Older blog entries for cipher (starting at number 12)

Getting ready to release Eucalyptus 0.1.4. The POP3 code is working wonderfully (albeit, no progress window yet) and I tracked down a couple bugs regarding opening newly arrived messages. The message display code doesn't handle anything other than text at the moment, but it shouldn't be too hard to add image display, etc.

I got an email from Corel today, which showed me that the message parser chokes on multipart/alternative, especially when they're nested inside a multipart/mixed message. Eek! I got some ideas this morning on how to rework the parser to handle this better, basically by peeling away the layers like an onion. It works in my head, let's see if it works in code! :)

And on an interesting note, that mail from Corel was an acceptance for their beta-test program for WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux! Cool! I'm still interested in seeing an open-source office suite, but I really do like WordPerfect. Too bad I have to wait 'til February.

Eucalyptus' filters window is now 99% operational, and the settings dialog is getting very near completion. Still need the viewers/mailcap dialog and some mail transfer progress windows, and we'll be right as rain. Eucalyptus is coming very close to being a usable mailer!!! Wheee!

What's left after that is what I'll just call "flash": viewing attachments (esp. images) via internal (or see next) viewer, and (what seems the coolest to me) Bonobo, so anyone can use their favorite text editor to compose messages, as well as using the appropriate program to view attachments. (Do any editors support Bonobo yet? No? Say it isn't so! Guess I'll have to port my favorite over from the Amiga ;)

Totally rewrote Eucalyptus' settings dialog, reducing it to one window from four. Much nicer, I think. Started work on the filters and viewers dialogs (making them operational).

I'm tossing around the idea of using GtkPlug/Socket for mail transfer progress windows, which may solve the whole issue of using threads for these things. I wish I knew definitively if GTK is totally thread-safe. More digging is in order.

Gah, which reminds me, I need to finish documenting GtkCList!!!!

Not much work done on Eucalyptus in the last couple days. Y2K looms ever closer, and I've been on the phone almost constantly with customers and Cisco getting things squared away and putting out fires.

On the home front, Michelle's ultrasound for Schifferer, v3.0 was today. The ultrastenographer (?) showed us undoubtedly that the baking bun is a boy. His name will be Theodore Alexander, partially after my father-in-law. Life is good. :)

Well, I'm staying home this morning because the snow is terrible (to me, I'm from California) and the wind just makes the driving conditions worse. I might go in to work later if it clears up. But, I digress....

A very nice person has taken it upon themselves to build RPMs of Eucalyptus 0.1.3. I guess I can put off further learning how to do that. ;)

Eucalyptus is coming along surprisingly well. The week-long rewrite of some of the parsing code took about 10-15 minutes (woohoo!), and now reply and forward work for the most part. Next, I think, will be folder creation/edit/deletion/etc. Very important. :)

I'm also considering taking copious notes of some of pine's feature-set.

Yikes! Haven't posted an entry in a while. Just woke up from a week-long turkey-induced nap. Or not.

I've been shifting back and forth from coding Eucalyptus to playing Baldur's Gate. Eucalyptus is coming along, but I'm running into some really annoy (g_)malloc quirks that are causing SEGVs just trying to allocate a small structure. In the process, I've ended up having to rework some of the header parsing code, and discovered that it really needs to be totally rewritten. Worked fine on the Amiga, but then this is no Amiga. Especially after writing that email library for AmigaOS3.5, I've learned some new ways to get things done, better, faster, yummier.

Checked out SourceForge today. Pretty slick. Got myself an account and got Eucalyptus approved as a project. Now I'll have to set up the web page for it, and commit the code to CVS.

I did some more work on Euc's POP code, and made some tweaks and such to other parts. I would like to be able to open the progress windows within the respective threads, but I don't know if that's possible with GTK/GDK currently. If anyone knows for sure, please let me know! :) As it stands, I'm resorting to mutexes and a simple message passing mechanism for visual updates while the threads are running.

I also need to get my sister-in-law's new Linux box up and running before we head down there for Thanksgiving.

Well, I started on the POP code. HP-UX upgrades are so tedious and drawn-out, so I had quite a bit of time to do some coding. It's a skeleton at the moment, but will be capable of checking multiple POP mailboxes simultanously (love them threads!), as well as supporting interactive downloading of mail. Pretty spiff, if I do say so myself. ;)

Cleaned up Euc's compose window a bit more. I'm really trying to simplify things like grabbing addresses from the address book, which was a bit complicated in the original Amiga version. Not to mention the fact that I was getting this bizarre occasional lock-up when adding addresses that I couldn't track down for the life of me. Solution: remove it. :)

I really really need to work on the POP code. At least that would rocket Eucalyptus into the semi-usable mailer category. Perhaps tomorrow during my HP upgrade I can hammer some of it out. We'll see.

Just did a new release of Eucalyptus -- 0.1.2.