Tired a bit (am both studying and working as a programmer). I'm glad the weekend has finally come. Recently metaur discovered some vulnerabilities in GNU Anubis. This was the first serious (and hope the last one) bug report since the last stable release in Dec 2002. Now heading the v3.9.94...

Finished a major reorganization in the Mailutils documentation. It's still not up-to-date and there is missing a lot of stuff, but I believe it should be now easier to complete it.

Watched Jackass: The Movie... yuck. Where is my brain?

Not much... just a little mailutils hacking. We now support the maildir format, which is very cool, the file: auto-detection url is great, and all from-like utilities now use rfc2047 decoding. We have also a new tool, called movemail.

And yesterday I went to listen to the 2,5h lecture on LaTeX. I already know Texinfo, which is obviously similar, but has different goals and is less powerful.

Today it was a hardware hacking day ;). I have moved my old Amiga hard drive (Seagate 1.7 GB) to my current workstation. There were six AFFS partitions, so I had to compile AFFS support into Linux kernel. I made several back-ups (old source codes, images, documents, etc.) and reformatted the drive using a common ext2 file system.

Not much to do... Savannah is down. This means no CVS write access.

Now reading an interesting article about the MSIL Assembly Language. Huh, this assembly language is even object-oriented, kinda funky ;). I was also googling for a document which shows the difference between .NET 1.1 and 1.2, but couldn't find anything. Then I finally started reading the C# 2.0 specification, which looks quite promising.

Hacking

Sergey and I made a lot of progress on GNU Anubis... :). The Ident protocol will be superfluous soon, but this still requires a lot of work to be done. I expect that version 4.0 will be released in Q1/2004.

Released a fresh new memory testing tool, designed as a wrapper around the standard libc memory allocation routines malloc, calloc, realloc, and free. It is called IMM and it's licensed under the LGPL.

Today I downloaded GNU Hurd image for Bochs. At last! Now I must find a real machine where I will be able to try GNU/Hurd as a native OS. Check out my homepage (hurd) to see the screenshots with Hurd running under Bochs.

Learnt some parts of C# and, as a usual exercise, wrote a simple stack and queues implementation. Now I am writing (just for fun ;) a simple RPN calculator with variables and function definitions. All on my home page. Today I also discovered a silly bug in Mono, which makes Ahead-of-time compilation disabled while using mono foo.exe instead of mono ./foo.exe (of course after doing previous mono --aot foo.exe). At the beginning I couldn't find the reason for this strange behavior, but lupus on #mono pointed me the solution.
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Saw Once Upon a Time in Mexico at the cinema last Friday. Not bad, even funny, but Desperado (1995) was much better (thanks to Steve Buscemi and Quentin Tarantino). Fortunately, Depp's performance was solid (memorable CIA t-shirt :)).

"I dreamt music."

I just watched Welcome to 2019 with an alternative music for Blade Runner. Yeah, it's a fan fiction videoclip, but very cool, and Pink Floyd's Welcome to the Machine alongside BR movie -- outstanding! Although I am a big fan of Pink Floyd music, I still think that the original soundtrack by Vangelis is one of the best ever made and the only one right for this great movie. I also hope that "BR: Special Edition DVD" isn't only a rumor...

Eureka!

I think I've found a good solution for my recent problem with the authorization mechanism in GNU Anubis. The idea is quite innovative and requires adding a new special mode. Probably it will take an extra 3 months to implement and test the solution. Right now, I won't write any details about it. Be patient.

Movies

Recently I saw Pirates of the Caribbean with an excellent performance by Johnny Depp. This is good and very entertaining movie. Johnny is cool. I can't wait to see Once Upon a Time in Mexico, here in Europe. I also saw a beautiful movie called Hero, which IMHO is good as or even better than Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

I am thinking about a new authentication mechanism for GNU Anubis, i.e. without the auth service (Identd). Running an Ident daemon is not always possible. The ESMTP authentication is also not the answer. It is so frustrating, why the creators of socket interface did not think about the remote authentication while using AF_INET? What a pity... Unix(7) says that there is a solution with SCM_CREDENTIALS (SCM_CREDS?) and SO_PASSCRED, but only for AF_LOCAL, and even this isn't much portable. The mechanism for sending unix credentials over the AF_INET would help me a lot!

Hacking

In a last few days I made several hacks in GNU Mailutils. And today GNU Anubis 3.9.93 has been released. This version is a maintenance release over the previous one. Today I also took Mailutils entry at Freshmeat.net.

Music

I just found a nice piece of sound: Every You Every Me by Placebo. I like this band, but weird is that I didn't know this song before. It is really good. This Saturday Placebo will give a concert only 120km away from me, and I won't be there :(.

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.