Entries posted in August 2013

I've spent the past few days overhauling the TAB-completion which is included in lumail.

Completing a single token is easy, if there is only one match, and you limit yourself to completing at the start of a line. But doing real completion is hard. Consider the case where you want to complete something like this:

unread_message_colour("re[TAB]

Clearly completing the first part "unread_[TAB]" is simple. But to complete "re" to "red" you need to split up your input line into tokens so that you can recognize a quote as a valid completion point.

Similarly you need to split on "(" to allow:

-- show the path to the editor
msg(edit[TAB]

To allow this to be changed/controlled by the user I defined completion_chars() which contains: SPACE, QUOTE, "(", etc.

I'm pleased with the user-callback for offering completion suggestions, my own is pretty basic and just includes all user-defined functions as well as an address book. The latter allows steve.org.uk[TAB] to complete to: "Steve Kemp" <[email protected]> - because we allow matches anywhere in the completion string, rather than just prefix-matching.

I struggled with resolving ambiguities, but now that is handled correctly too. Press "TAB" when there are multiple choices available and you can graphically TAB-through the available choices, or press Esc to cancel.

In conclusion I've spent a few days fighting with user-interface stuff and now the mail-client is better, but I've still to tackle RFC 2047 header decoding because that is really hard!

Tags: lumail | 1 comment

A hectic day and now we use GMime for all MIME-fu.

This has allowed me to decode headers correctly, setup MIME parts properly in outgoing mails with attachments, and cleanup the code-base.

The next release of Lumail will contain basically just this change, as it is pretty drastic. But first I need to work out how to make binaries for Squeeze compiled against the back-ported version of gmime-2.6.x.

(Previously we used libmimetic. Which was awesome in its way, but caused me some pain with RFC 2047 header-decoding.)

Tags: lumail | No comments

This morning I made a new release of Lumail, which recently completed the transition from using mimetic to GMime for all its MIME needs.

I was happy with mimetic, except it didn't have the facility to decode encoded header-values. I wrote some code, but it was broken, so I made the decision that we should move to something that made this easier, and GMime was chosen.

Jeffrey Stedfast was very helpful in answering my questions with near-perfect code samples.

Beyond that this release features some more Lua primitives and a couple of bug-fixes.

The only annoyance is that the version of GMime I'm using, 2.6.x, isn't available to users of the Squeeze release of Debian GNU/Linux. It is available as a backport, but that means building binaries with sbuild is a pain - due to #700522.

So for the moment I've only built binaries for Wheezy users.

ObQuote: "You know who I am, I've not been off TV for that long!" - Alan Patridge, Alpha Papa

Tags: backports, lumail | 3 comments

This weekend I'm mostly alternating between reading, writing, and trying to avoid death by the plague.[*]

I've switched Lumail to using a UTF-8 aware string library, which means we can now handle the obvious case:

--
-- Prove keybindings work.
--
keymap['global']['π'] = 'msg("UTF-8 rocks!")'

Similarly we can stuff input into the buffer:

--
-- Pretend the user typed ":msg ...\n"
--
stuff( ":msg('π is pie')\n" );

This transition was annoying to handle, but wasn't too difficult. There is only one more major update required, according to the development roadmap, which is to double check that UTF-8 output is correct.

Otherwise I think I'm almost done. In the sense that I don't see anything obvious missing, barring things that won't ever happen such as mutt-style "tag" support.

I've updated the online examples to include some nice code:

• A nice menu for viewing/opening attachments: view_attachments().
• A nice system for marking messages as read based upon their subjects: mark_read_by_pattern().

I can't claim to have many users, so far the development has been carried out by myself and approximately four other people. But that matters not. I genuinely believe this is a good client and it really suits the way that I handle (large volumes of) email:

• Show folders with unread mail.
• Quickly read it.

Allowing you to open multiple folders at once means you get a great view into your currently-unread mail, regardless of where procmail has placed it.

The overriding feeling having "completed" the client is that Lua rocks. I'm torn between wanting to sleep some more, and wondering what other system/package/tool can be extended by Lua. As epiphanies go my on_idle() update takes some beating.

* - I do not have the black death, but I'm not well.

Tags: lua, lumail | 2 comments

Github is a nice site, and I routinely monitor a couple of projects there.

I've also been using it to host a couple of my own projects, initially as an experiment, but since then because it has been useful to get followers and visibility.

I'm a little disappointed that you don't get to see more data though; today my sysadmin utilities repository received several new "stars". Given that these all occurred "an hour ago" it seems likely that they we referenced in a comment somewhere on LWN, hacker news, or similar.

Unfortunately I've no clue where that happened, or if it was a coincidence.

I expect this is more of a concern for those users who use github-pages, where having access to the access.logs would be more useful still. But ..

Tags: github, sysadmin-util | 3 comments

This week I have mostly:

Knocked up a forum ("gathering")

It is a simple clone of hacker news, storing things in Redis.

None of the aging though, entries are first->last and my tagging support is basic.

I'm in two minds about releasing it. I'm in three minds about deploying it at the location I'd written it for - forums.lumail.org - since there's nothing worse than a forum with no posts, unless it is a forum that used to be popular and is now a wasteland, or circlejerk. (c.f. slashdot. ahem.)

Updated Slaugther

I found a hidden dependency when installing a new slaughter controlled host.

A new release is imminent.

Setup a remote host for backups

Using BigV I configured a system with LUKS-encrypted disks to act as a "remote dropbox" via git-annex, and rsync.

An encrypted volume is manually mounted post-boot. It stays mounted (oops that's bad) but provides security when the guest is offline, or has been retired.

Wrestled with Graphite

Because damn that software is hard to install.

Turned down two weddings

Because I will never shoot a wedding again. And if I did I'd not do it for free for "exposure".

Merged my (digital) music archive with that belonging to my partner

Which took more discussion than a) moving in together, or b) opening a shared bank account.

Secretly decided I do like my kindle

Even though I bought two books from a charity shop tonight I'm almost certainly going to file them away and look for the epub online instead.

He fought with the goblins! He battled the trolls! He riddled with Gollum! The magic ring he stole!

This weekend I'll be mostly offline. Saturating my home broadband while I sync backups.

Tags: gathering, lumail | No comments