It's been more than two weeks since I do not have an access to my primary mail server at gnu.org. All because of fencepost is temporarily down (FYI, because of recent crack of the GNU FTP site). I'm really unhappy about this. I know that this is a serious problem, but still it takes too long...

I am learning Scheme, a dialect of Lisp. Functional programming is amazing and very different from imperative programming. Currently I am able to write some simple programs in Scheme, including stacks and queues implementations. I have a book called Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (MIT, Second Edition), but I think it is not the best choice for Scheme newbies, although it is not so difficult. Only two last chapters (Metalinguistic Abstraction and Computing with Register Machines) seem to be quite tricky. Anyway, I have also found a nice on-line tutorial, called Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days, and at last I recommend... the R5RS document, the most comprehensive material :).

I also got interested in C# programming language, after I installed Mono.

Hacking

GNU Anubis 3.9.90 (alpha version, 4.0 pre-release) has been released after 7 months of development. It is now available on alpha.gnu.org. Unfortunately just after I released it, I found a couple of bugs, but luckily this is only an alpha release and the latest fixed code is available in CVS repository.

Today I discovered a very nice free software project, called PlaneShift.

Yes, it is a computer game, but not the usual one. PlaneShift is a persistent fantasy multiplayer Role Playing Game with state-of-the-art 3D graphics. It is a really huge project for many, many years, and the most important thing about it is its freedom. Everyone can become a PlaneShift player and everyone can develop it!

Currently I am not a computer games player, but I used to be about 10 years ago. I had a great Amiga 500 and I remember many nice titles, including The Secret of Monkey Island, Civilization, Pirates!, Dune II, or Frontier: Elite II. Especially the last title was amazing for me for its extreme large universe to explore (I look forward to seeing Elite IV).

Nowadays I am a software programmer so I don't have time for computer games. Well... I have my own PS2, but the last game I played was FFX more than a year ago...

Yesterday I finished a technical paper about Sieve: A Mail Filtering Language. This paper is now available on my home page, but unfortunately for most people it is written in Polish language. If you cannot read it ;-) try the RFC documents: 3028 and 3431. In addition you should also read the GNU Mailutils Manual.