Back again

After a more-than-busy two-week pause I'm back again (I'd better tell some other time what I've been doing during these two weeks). Most important news during this time are: together with Max we have set up our server (Ulysses) and I've finally managed to mirror both ftp.gnu.org and www.gnu.org. Moreover, both mirrors are now accessible as ftp.gnu.org.ua and www.gnu.org.ua.

Another mirror I've been runnng, that of the Unix Heritage Society at tuhs.org.ua, is now hosted on this server too.

Needless to say that my personal page is served by Ulysses as well.

The question now is, how much will it cost to maintain all this, given its average daily traffic... We'll see...

Other FS news: a simple script to view po files. Why? I don't know. May prove useful some day... Click here to see it work.

Hacked on GNU mailutils and introduced a universal sql-access layer. The auth library has been rewritten accordingly and mail.local is finally able to retrieve mailbox quotas from SQL database, a feature many of the mailutils users have constantly pinged me about.

While feedling with mailutils I've noticed something that makes me feel a bit uncomfortable: we have no convention on how to write diagnostic messages. Some of them begin with a capital letter, some don't. Some end with a period, some don't. A chaos. We should certainly change it, but I'd better do it after releasing 0.5.1 maintenance release (this change will affect po files, and hence will require waiting for the translators to finish their jobs).

Anubis: a couple of security-related changes proposed by Ulf Härnhammar. Socks.c still waiting to be rewised by Wojtek.

Oh, yes, forgotten to say: among various junk on my machine I've excavated my geek code. Its surprising how little has changed since I wrote it...

Items from my museum

An /etc/issue made by a friend of mine for one of my machines. It is dated some time around 1999

                                  /^\   
                            -==#########==-
                             ____/~^~\_____        
                            ////|||||||\\\\\ 
                           |\---.______.---/|
                           | _ . -   ...- . |
                           |  ##### ./~\. . |
                           |. # @ =  \_/. . | 
                           |  #,  # __ . -  | 
                           |. #   = .  -- . |
                           |_ #####  ..   - |
                            \\\\||||||||////
                              T~~~T~~~~~~T
                              @   @      @  

       |~~~\   /~~   |~~~\   /~~   |      /~~~\  ~~~T~~~  ~~~~~/
       |   |  |      |   |  |      |     /     \    |         /
       |___/  |--    |___/  |--    |     |     |    |        /
       |      |      |      |      |     |-----|    |       / 
       |       \__   |       \__   \___  |     |    |     /_____

I baptized the machine pepelatz (a term from Georgi Daneliya's film Kin-Dza-Dza). Wander what's this? Here's the definition:

I can only add that the machine looked almost exactly as its prototype :)

I have been chasing for bugs in gsasl 0.2.2 for over four hours. Managed to find quite a few. Debugging is probably the most exhaustive kind of work I've ever tried...

Emacs folks have begun arguing about GFDL vs. GPL problem (though, frankly speaking I can't see any problem at all). Debian people evidently become tired of it and their discussion on this topic has faded away. Now it's emacs-devel turn, isn't it? Interestingly, how similar both threads are: the two sides go on spitting different reasons and no one seems to have heard the other, whereas RMS keeps olympic silence and only when really annoyed does he tell: "I believe GFDL does what it should". So spricht Zaratustra...

Several things have happened recently:

• A courageous decision of the Polish Government prevented European Union from adopting a disastrous "Software Patent Directive"
• Re-elections in Ukraine. Let's wait for the results...
• A bunch of christmas releases: Anubis 4.0, tar 1.15.1, cpio 2.6 and mailutils 0.6