Hacking
GNU Anubis 3.9.92 has been released.
As usual, each new version is much better than the previous one.
Because of the problems with GNU servers, it is not available at
alpha.gnu.org. Read more from bug-anubis archives.
E-mail2
In my opinion, so called E-mail2 would be a bad
idea. Mostly because of the problems with backward compatibility. It
would be very hard to convince people about the new standard. Current
e-mail (SMTP) is the right thing. I do not see many of its flaws, but
I see many advantages and simplicity. Many people say that the primary
flaw of e-mail is its weakness of malicious usage, like spam for
example. I don't agree with this. In this particular case our law is
to blame for this. The law should be more restricted for spamers. I
mean not less than 2 years in prison for sending a huge amount of
spam. Besides that, there must be a better anti-spam software built-in
on every public mail server.
Books
Right now I am reading the classic book called
Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools by Aho, Sethi,
and Ullman (1986). This book is also known as the dragon book.
Quite good.
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.