I've returned to Helsinki after visiting the FOSDEM-conference in Brussels. Before anything else, I'd like to thank and compliment the organizers for creating a great conference. And not just the organizers, all the volunteers that made it another great FOSDEM. The amount of work that goes into something like this cannot be overestimated, and it all went very smooth. If anything, it was too succesful, so many people...

Anyway, I had the chance to meet a great many old friends, as well make new ones. It's fantastic to see all the free software projects that improve things all over the software stack. Kernel, console, X, web services, funky UI bling, end-user applications, embedded software,... So much combined brain power, pushing the envelope of free software.

I did a presentation (should be available soon) of our own little addition to that, the modest e-mail client. Although there was some delay (Murphy!), I was quite happy with my talk. And it was particularly interesting to talk to modest users - what do they like, what do they miss, and so on. Overall, we've been blessed with very helpful users, and with there assistance, we were able to kill quite a number of bugs which would have very hard to fix otherwise. See our resolved buglist in our bugzilla for some great examples of that.

Anyway, overall FOSDEM made me quite happy -- such a gathering of smart people and great software, promising a lot of good things for the free software future.

Note, screenshot is of the unstable, proof-of-concept GNOME desktop-version of modest, courtesy of dape.

This coming weekend, a big part of our multinational modest-team (Sergio, Berto, Philip and Dirk) will be at the FOSDEM conference in Brussels. There will even be a presentation about the modest e-mail client. So, if you have any questions, suggestions or even some constructive(!) criticism, this is your chance! You can use IM if you're looking for me (diggler[at]gmail.com).

Last year, I had a great time at FOSDEM, with many, many interesting people as well as the nice atmosphere (food and drinks) in Brussels. Hope to see many of you there!

Achilles had Patroclus. Don Quixote had Sancho Panza. Michael Jackson has Bubbles. And I have emacs. On my N810. A while ago, I already wrote about it. I even showed some screenshot of emacs running in scratchbox. But, I didn't take the final step - getting it to run on an actual N810. Recently, I tried to get that to work. Well, that was frustrating... Some hackish instructions follow. They may or may not work for you -- try at your own risk :)

• First I tried to simply rebuild the Emacs23-packages in scratchbox; that failed, because the compilation somehow crashes QEMU;
  
• Then I tried Emacs 22 instead... but the problem remained;
  
• So, I decided that maybe I should try to compile the package it on the N810 itself. Again, that failed. One of many problems: package building requires a real grep, and if you try to install it, it wants to remove the whole busybox environment; sigh. I fought the system - the system won...
  

But, all was not lost. There are prebuilt Debian packages of Emacs22 available; I took the armel-packages from there, and tried to install them. That almost worked. Almost, because the size of emacs is almost legendary. It did not fit on my root file system on the N810.

We're nearing the solution though; I copied the contents of the .debs to a directory emacs810 (with mc); then I copied this directory to the MMC-card of the N810 (/media/mmc2/). I set some symlinks, ie.

  # ln -s /media/mmc2/emacs810/usr/share/emacs /usr/share/emacs
  # ln -s /media/mmc2/emacs810/usr/share/emacs22 /usr/share/emacs22
  # ln -s /media/mmc2/emacs810/usr/bin/emacs22-gtk /usr/bin/emacs22
  # ln -s /media/mmc2/emacs810/usr/share/applications/emacs22.desktop /usr/share/applications/hildon/

Also, you'll need to install libungif4g. That should do the trick, and emacs should show up in your Extras-menu. And we can run emacs! Victory is mine!

Well, almost. In emacs, a very useful key is the Meta-key, usually mapped to the Alt-key of your keyboard. But of course, there's no alt-key on the N810-keyboard. Instead, I decided to remap the Chr-key. I'd like to remap it in my .emacs, but I haven't been able to do so.

Anyway, as a first start, I added these to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/nokia_vndr/rx-44 (the xkb keyboard mapping):

   key <SPCE> {  [ space, space, Tab, space ] };
   key <COMP> {  [ Meta_L, Meta_L, Multi_key, Meta_L ] };
Click to read 202 more words
    

Note, image has not much to do with this post, it's emacs22 running on my N810. More about that in my next post

Ok, I guess it's still in time to wish people a happy new year. Apart from the obligatory sessions of eating, drinking and reconnecting with my inner-child, Christmas has been a great time to enrich the internal uranium, and I feel full of 235U again. I'm sure I'll need plenty of it in the new year. So, once more, best wishes to all, at let's make the world a better place in 2008.

One thing to get there is of course is to polish that raw diamond that we call modest. I've been quite happy with the progress we've made since our bèta less than one month ago. We've closed quite a number of bugs, and made steady improvements in performance and the handling of specific emails and mail servers. And we've been making frequent releases, roughly every week. If you're using these weekly updates, you might not necessarily see so much difference between versions, depending of course on your particular use case. But believe me when I say that we are not sitting still :)

Anyhow, there are a couple of problems we're looking into now:

• first, performance problems with really big folders (ie., many thousands of mails). We're trying to come up with a solution, but it's not easy (as is the case with most interesting things in life). Please bear with us;
  
• second, problems with specific servers. Here you can help us! We're testing modest with different POP/IMAP/SMTP servers. But, there are many more different ones in the world, with a wide variety of versions, configurations - a combinatorial explosion. If your server doesn't play nice with modest, please file bugs with all the details (server, version, configuration,...). Also, protocol traces or PCAP-files (tcpdump/wireshark) are very useful, as are test accounts. Remember, if we cannot reproduce it, we probably can't fix it. If there's information you don't want to share with bugs.maemo.org, you may also mail me directly. That does require you to trust me, though.
  
• finally, we've seen some problems with rare emails not being shown correctly. Again, if you get such an email, please file a bug, and attach the email (after stripping it of any privacy-sensitive information of course).
  

Anyhow, for the large majority of users, modest seems to be working quite nicely; if you haven't tried it yet, I invite you to give modest a try, and tell us what you think.

(and it's not even over yet)

The end is nigh - the shortest day of the year. Next week, I'll be spending some time in the lovely city of Amsterdam, enjoying various Christmas-related festivities. No matter how nice it is here, it will be good to leave Helsinki behind for a couple of days, and do something different.

At last, the OS2008-images have been published. A big improvement, I should say, and there should be little reason not to upgrade... One more reason to upgrade, is that you can then install modest :-) Just this afternoon, we've published updated packages. I also look forward to play with Canola2, created by those talented Brazilians. It would be even better if they could release it under the GPL, as has been suggested.

Yes¸modest... Even though our public public bèta is not even two weeks old, we have a lot to look back on. It's been an incredible year, even just looking at the modest-microcosmos. I am very proud of the the team, a group of truly amazing individuals. Nevertheless, we won't rest on our laurels, and look forward. The latest release (Friday 21.12) should be the best so far, and will also be the last of 2007. As I said before, if you find bugs, or feel something is missing: please visit bugs.maemo.org (component: Communication/Modest). We've already cleared up quite some of the issues that were reported - your voices are being heard! In 2008 we will return with our batteries fully recharged...

Merry Christmas to All!

Yet another modest-post. We received a lot of feature requests and a handful of bugs after our repeated requests. We're working hard on fixing the bugs, and let's see what we can do with the feature requests. It's not easy to find the right balance between keeping things simple and, on the other hand, adding features that people ask for. Being a long-time mutt and emacs user, I have some troubles keeping things simple & easy. But hey, nobody said it was easy.

Let's discuss something that I found quite useful: reading feeds with modest.

I like reading feeds; whenever I need to wait for something (e.g. waiting for the food during a romantic dinner), I like to read something interesting - software, science, culture, whatever. Now, while there is a feedreader on my N810, obviously I'd prefer to use modest for that.

Well, that's perfectly possible using feed2imap. I am assuming a Ubuntu/Debian system here, but it should work for other systems as well, mutatis mutandis.

• install feed2imap and libopenssl-ruby on your system;
  
• create a ~/.feed2imaprc file, it should look something like this (assuming you're using Gmail/IMAP):
  

  
  feeds: 
  - name: Planet Maemo
    url: http://maemo.org/news/planet-maemo/rss.xml
    target: imaps://someuser%40gmail.com:somepassword@imap.gmail.com/feeds/software
  - name: Ririan Project
    url: http://ririanproject.com/feed/
    target: imaps://someuser%40gmail.com:somepassword@imap.gmail.com/feeds/misc
  - name: Boing Boing
    url: http://www.boingboing.net/atom.xml
    target: imaps://someuser%40gmail.com:somepassword@imap.gmail.com/feeds/misc
  - name: ScienceDaily Headlines
    url: http://www.sciencedaily.com/newsfeed.xml
    target: imaps://someuser%40gmail.com:somepassword@imap.gmail.com/feeds/science
    

  
  Obviously, you'll have to change the username/password;
  
• Note: if your are already using a different feedreader (such as Liferea), you can export your existing feedlist to an .opml-file. You can then convert this to a config file for feed2imap:
  

  $ feed2imap-opmlimport ~/feedlist.opml > ~/.feed2imaprc

  
  (you'll have to hand-edit it a bit as above)
  

That's it! Now you can periodically run feed2imap, and you'll always have something interesting in your mailbox.

First, thanks for all the very positive feedback we got about our initial modest release. This was only the start, we'll be making frequent updates - the first one was already today. If you face any particular problem, please let us know.

Some questions I saw in various places:

• can I get it to work on OS2007? Well - in principle that should be possible, as we tried to keep the code backwards-compatible with the old API. In fact, some people claim to be happy users. However, we haven't tested that recently, and there might be some missing dependencies, so YMMV. But we'll be looking into this issue.
  
• I'd really like modest to do $FEATURE, but it doesn't do $FEATURE. What can I do? Well, patches/suggestions are welcome; please discuss them on our mailing list first, or put them in Maemo Bugzilla;
  
• how can I replace the official client with modest? There are some adventurous people out there... Modest might replace the current client at some stage, but right now, it's not really easy to do that.
  
• where can I report bugs/feature requests? Please report them in Maemo Bugzilla, and make sure you use Communication/Modest (don't use Communications/Email, that's for the stock email client). Please specificy as clearly as possible the problem, and how we could reproduce it. Some people already filed bugs there, and even better, some where already fixed!
  

We're working very hard on fixing bugs and making other improvements. Modest is not perfect and there are bugs. But already, I am a quite happy modest-user myself. And feel inspired by modest and Vagalume-hacker Berto, for the incredibly flattering words, especially on my birthday!