Older blog entries for bcully (starting at number 10)

Yay! That !@#$ beam-it story has finally been bumped off the main page. Thank you, new stories.

I've added VVV's account-hook to mutt, working with multiple IMAP accounts is not so bad now.

I should be releasing ices 0.2 (first in the development branch) today. Chock full of new features, including the multiple streams and vorbis reencoding...

I've checked in support for vorbis source files in ices. I'm in time for Ogg/Vorbis 1.0rc1 too :)

Now to get back to mutt hacking...

ices 0.1.0 is out, which means immediately afterwards I merged in the multiple stream code. now to do error-handling. The icecast project is really fun, I'm enjoying working with jack and michael too.

I really have to get a job soon...

Well, I'm now the ices maintainer, so the multistreaming code will probably be official ices code some time next week. Before that I'm bringing the current CVS tree back to health. It compiles and runs again, the only thing left before I tag it and merge in multistreaming is to make it backwards compatible with the last stable release of LAME.

Well, mutt 1.3.19 is out the door, so I took a little break. That means hacking on something else, of course :)

This time it was icecast. I just taught ices how to reencode its stream at multiple bitrates/channels to multiple mountpoints. This is handy for web radio stations (like the one I'm developing in s3kr3t), since you can broadcast the same stream for broadband and dialup users.

I sent the patch to icecast@xiph.org, it's also here (gzipped).

nice day, maybe I'll go for a bike ride.

Mutt now has the last feature I plan to add before 1.4 (you can select your authentication method). For the next couple weeks I expect nothing but bug fixes. And I've closed about 25% of the open bugs in the last few days...

I had a look at computer jobs in Toronto on monster.com, and they are not attractive. I wonder where the good-looking jobs hang out...

I've been on a mutt tear - fixed a zillion little network bugs and worked on concurrent access to the same IMAP folder. Now

  • it doesn't seem to crash
  • if you change message flags in one session they get picked up automatically in the others
I don't know how many people will notice unless they're playing around, but it looks cool.

I've gotten almost all the features in that I want for 1.4 (still want to make authentication method configurable), after that it's pure bug-hunting. I think.

It looks like the driver API will have to wait. I raised the topic on mutt-dev and it looks like we're going to start the push for 1.4. I'll be doing bugfixes for the next couple of weeks - caught a nice bug with multiple sessions on the same mailbox today. I should work on what happens when you lose your connection now.

I've decided to take the plunge and move the libimap API into a driver model (aka a structure with a bunch of function pointers). I hope this will reduce the rampant #ifdef USE_IMAPs in the code and generally make things less incestuous. The dirty relationship between all the functions makes it hard to work on robustness - too many side effects. Anyway I've gotten just enough code done now that nothing compiles :)

Took an online pretest for a job in Toronto - about twenty really basic questions on C and java. and there I was getting nervous about it.

I couldn't seem to get into hack mode today, so I contented myself with closing twenty-odd old bugs. I'm tempted to start moving at least the imap code into a driver model, in which I embed a set of well-defined function pointers into each mailbox context, but I keep flip-flopping between doing incremental improvements and really thinking out what interfaces I need. I'll probably take the incremental route, because I really believe in avoiding overengineering. I've found my instincts are paradoxically more correct when I don't think too far ahead. That is, when I have a specific problem and I make a slightly general solution for it, I usually get great code reuse and find later problems easy to solve. But when I have no problem and just guess at things I might like to do later I usually guess wrong and have to chuck my framework.

On a different tack, I'm going to be living elsewhere by September (earlier if possible). I finally graduated and have just recently gotten back from a great two month trip to Mexico - now it's time to join the Real World. I'm looking lazily for work in the Toronto area (right now I'm in the New York area). If anyone knows something interesting around there (and happens to read this - thanks katzj, jonkare, and jarod) feel free to drop me a line.

Finally, I see I can <wiki>use the wiki tag</wiki>. Sounds pretty cool. If only I knew what it did.

oh, and does anyone know whether I've eagerly certified rms or a decoy? I'm pretty sure I got suckered...

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