Entries posted in April 2013

I look after a bunch of servers, working for Bytemark that is not a surprise, but I only touch a very small number of desktop systems.

precious - My desktop

This is the machine upon which I develop, check my personal mail, play my music & etc.

steve - My work machine

To keep the working from home separation going I have a machine I only use for work purposes.

travel/travel2 - EEPC box

I have two EEPC machines, a personal 701 and a work-provided 901.

Honestly these rarely get used. One is for when I'm on holiday or traveling, the second for when I'm on-call.

Yesterday I got round to upgrading both the toy EEPC machines to wheezy. The good news? Both of them upgraded/reinstalled easily. Hardware was all detected, sleeping, hibernation, wifi, etc all "just worked".

Unfortunately I am now running GNOME 3.x and the experience is unpleasant. This is a shame, because I've enjoyed GNOME 2.x & bluetile for the past few years.

The only other concern is that pwsafe appears to be scheduled for removal from Debian GNU/Linux - the list of open bugs shows some cause, but there are bugs there that are trivial to fix.

For the moment I've rebuilt the package and if I cannot find a suitable alternative - available for squeeze and wheezy - then I will host the package on my package repository.

In conclusion: Debian, you did good. GNOME, I've loved and appreciated you for years, but you might not be the desktop I want these days. It's not you, it's me.

Tags: gnome, pwsafe, wheezy | 24 comments

As previously mentioned I was looking to package pwsafe for Wheezy, as this is one of the few tools that I rely upon which isn't present.

There are now packages available, with the source on github.

I've also been doing some minor scripting because I've run into a few common problems recently:

run-parts

run-parts is a simple utility which will run every executable in a directory, more or less.

In Debian-land run-parts is the mechanism for /etc/cron.daily and /etc/cron.hourly - and that is where I've had problems recently.

Imagine you run a backup via cron.daily. Further imagine that you run a post-backup rsync and that this might take many many hours. If your backup takes >=24 hours you're screwed.

To that end I've patched my run-parts tool to alert and exit if a prior invocation is still running.

silent-run

I think everybody has this script - hide all output when running a command, unless the command fails. Looking today I see chronic from Joey's excellent moreutils does this. D'oh.

I think I've done more, but I cannot remember. In conclusion software is both easy and hard - easy because these two trivial changes were within my reach, but hard because years after encountering GNU/Linux we still have to add in the missing pieces.

Still could be worse, I spent four/five hours yesterday evening fighting with MS-SQL server, and that is time I'm never going to get back.

Tags: pwsafe, random, software | 8 comments

This may be useful, may become useful, or may not:

• https://github.com/skx/sysadmin-util

Tags: github | 2 comments

I've recently started staging upgrades from Squeeze to Wheezy. One unpleasant surprise was that the mutt-patched package available to Debian doesn't contain the "sidebar-new-only" patch.

This means I need to maintain it myself again, which I'd rather avoid. Over time I've been slowly moving to standard Debian systems, trying to not carry too many local perversions around.

Unfortunately if you've kept all your mail since 1994 you have many mailboxes. having mutt-patched available at all, with the sidebar patch, is a great timesaver. But I don't want to see mailboxes I'm never going to touch; just mailboxes with new mail in them.

Also I find the idea of having to explicitly define mailboxes a pain. Just run inotify on ~/Maildir and discover the damn things yourself. Please computer, compute!

If you divide up "mail client" into distinct steps it doesn't seem so hard:

• Show a list of folders: all, new-mail-containing only.
• Viewing a list of mail-messages: all in folder, or folders.
• Compose a new mail.
• Reply to a mail.

Obviously there is more to it than that. Sending mail? exec( sendmail ). Filtering mail? procmail/sieve/etc. Editing mail? exec(vim).

I'm sure if I were to start a core of a program, suitable for myself, would be simple enough. Maybe with lua, maybe with javascript, but with a real language at the core.

Anyway I've thought this before, and working with quilt and some ropy patches has always seemed like the way to go. Maybe it still is, but I can dream.

(PS. Sup + Notmuch both crash on my archives. I do not wish to examine them further. Still some interesting ideas. It should be possible to say "maildirs are tags; view "~/Maildir/.livejournal.2003" and ~/Maildir/.livejournal.2007 at the same time. Why just a single directory in the "index-view? So 1994.)

Disjointed posts R Us.

Obquote: "How hard could it be?" -- Patrick.

Tags: mutt, sup | 7 comments

To recap: given the absence of other credible alternatives I had two options:

• Re-hack mutt to give me a sidebar that will show only folders containing new messages.
• Look at writing a "simple mail client". Haha. Ha. Hah.

I think there is room for a new console client, because mutt is showing its age and does feel like it should have a real extension language - be it guile, lisp, javascript(!), Lua, or something else.

So I distilled what I thought I wanted into three sections:

• mode-ful. There would be a "folder-browsing mode", a "message-browsing mode" and a "read-a-single-message" mode.
• There would be scripting. Real scripting. I chose Lua.
• You give it ~/Maildir as the configuration. Nothing else. If the damn computer cannot find your mailboxes something is wrong.

So how did I do? I wrote a ncurses-based client which has Lua backed into it. You can fully explore the sidebar-mode - which lets you select multiple folders.

From there you can view the messages in a list.

What you can't do is anything "real":

• Update a messages flags. new -> read, etc.
• GPG-validation.
• MIME-handling.
• Attachment viewing.

For a two-day hack it is remarkably robust, and allowing scripting shows awesomeness. Consider this:

--
-- show all folders in the Maildir-list.
--
function all()
   -- ensure that the sidebar displays all folders
   sidebar_mode = "all";
   -- we're going to be in "maildir browsing mode"
   cmail_mode = "sidebar";
   reset_sidebar();
   refresh_screen();
end

--
-- Test code, show that the pattern-searching works.
--
-- To use this press ":" to enter the prompt, then enter "livejournal".
--
-- OR press "l" when in the sidebar-mode.
--
function livejournal()
   sidebar_pattern = "/.livejournal.2";
   sidebar_mode = "pattern";
   reset_sidebar();
   refresh_screen();
end

--
-- There is a different table for each mode.
--
keymap = {}
keymap['sidebar'] = {}
keymap['index']   = {}
keymap['message'] = {}

--
-- In the sidebar-mode "b" toggles the sidebar <-> index.
--
-- ":" invokes the evaluator.
-- "q" quits the browser and goes to the index-mode.
-- "Q" quits the program entirely.
--
keymap['sidebar'][':'] = "prompt-eval"
keymap['sidebar']['b'] = "toggle"
keymap['sidebar']['q'] = "toggle"
keymap['sidebar']['Q'] = "exit"

-- show all/unread/livejournal folders
keymap['sidebar']['a'] = "all"
keymap['sidebar']['u'] = "unread"
keymap['sidebar']['l'] = "livejournal"

Neat, huh? See the cmail.lua file on github for more details.

My decision hasn't really progressed any further, though I can see that if this client were complete I'd love to use it. Its just that the remaining parts are the fiddly ones.

I guess I'll re-hack mutt, and keep this on the back-burner.

The code is ropey in places, but should you wish to view:

• https://github.com/skx/cmail

And damn C is kicking my ass.

Tags: cmail, console, development, lua, mail | 4 comments