Alex Hudson

First post after being “away” – my server was down for a little while too :/ No matter, I wasn’t really in a position to blog anyway. Real life has interrupted for a bit, although I’ve managed a bit of hacking to distract myself.

So, we’ve had various troubles with IMAP. Somewhat hilariously, although I wrote a message to -devel about this, I did it from my trunk Bongo, which doesn’t actually send e-mail since the smtpc code was committed (which I think is a configuration issue over here rather than a bug of Pat’s). So, d’oh to that. I’ll blog about this instead, then.

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I do love a good diagram, and I noticed that I have a number of Bongo-related diagrams stuck on my hard-drive. Most of them have seen action in a past blog post of mine, but my blog isn’t really a Bongo development resource, and the ones which haven’t yet been seen really ought to be a bit more widely available.

In general, though, programmers aren’t great at drawing things and worse, updating diagrams in drawing programs is often tedious and time-consuming. So, I’ve committed some graphviz support into our build system which runs when you build the development documentation.

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So, Bongo didn’t make it into Google’s Summer of Code, but we did get some nice feedback from them. There’s good news and bad news 🙂

The good news is that they thought our application was very well done, and it was basically because they don’t have room for everyone that we didn’t get in: it sounds like we would have been acceptable, it just wasn’t our roll of the die. Unfortunate, but fair enough – I do suspect that Google have a theme or themes for each GSoC, and it might just be that we didn’t fit well this year.

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… today is World Water Day. There is a flashy 2007 website too, not sure why.

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Planet Debian has been a trove of green discussion today. Russell Coker and MJ both linked to a story about Spain getting most of its energy from wind, for the first time. 27% of their energy came from wind, 22% came from nucular power and 16% from coal power (where the other third came from, I’m not totally clear on – possibly imported?). Overall, in the last year, almost 10% of their energy has come from wind. I think that’s pretty amazing, especially since it meant for that small time, almost 50% of their power was coming from relatively carbon-clean sources.

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There has been a little bit of Bongo hacking. In an ideal world, Pat would get with the programme and get himself a blog. People should keep bugging him on IRC to start blogging, and he could be writing some of this stuff instead of me 🙂

First up, the big connio-on-GNUTLS patch has landed. Pat has worked extremely hard on this, and while I’ve helped out on some setup stuff, it’s basically his work. This means that connio-using agents now use GNU TLS as their secure sockets and TLS implementation (pretty much, SMTP is the only renegade).

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Last weekend I started looking at Hawkeye, prompted mostly by the need for people to be able to change the config for Bongo while we’re putting the new config system in place.

After a bit of hacking last night, it’s finally at the stage where it does something useful! You can run it under bongo-standalone (previously this wasn’t possible), you can log in as a user, and you can enable or disable agents from startup.

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There’s nothing which divides hackers so much as HTML as a format for sending mail. However, a recent discussion on another mailing list makes me think that there is hope for it.

I should state up-front that I’m very much in favour of HTML as a mail format. I outlined a couple of the technical reasons why in my posting on the subject, but it can be summarised mainly to:

• it’s the sanest way to work in web mail;
• done right, HTML enables editors and viewers to do much smarter things.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think plain text is going away – in fact, there are many popular examples of it (witness SMS text messaging and, to some extent, instant messaging, Facebook wall posts, etc.). But it’s also not the be-all and end-all of communication: the richer presentation and semantic of well-structured HTML isn’t to be sniffed at.

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For a while, I’ve been intending to put a list of inspirational articles on our wiki. Not really so much that I think everyone should read them – though I think they’re all worthwhile reading – more so that I can find them again when I think about them. Of course, the last time I actually remembered I wanted to do this and had some spare time, the wiki was down.

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It has been a little while in the making, and the construction signs are still up, but we’re almost there. After our community IRC meeting earlier this month, we decided that the uncertainty was a problem, and Bongo is the result.

I think this is working out well for a few reasons. We’ve seen more activity and participation this month than I think probably in the previous six or more beforehand. But also, we seem to have a strong idea of where we want to go.

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