Tollef Fog Heen's blog

The first, initial version of the libtdb backend for evolution-data-server is ready. It seems to work fine so far (for me), but is probably buggy. Feedback appreciated.

To use it:

1. download the tarball

2. unpack into evolution-data-server/addressbook/backends

3. adjust evolution-data-server/addressbook/Makefile.am and configure.in appropriately.

4. rerun auto*

5. build evolution-data-server. The backend should now be in evolution-data-server/addressbook/backends/tdb/.libs/libebookbackendtdb.so and can either be installed with make install or just copied to /usr/lib/evolution-data-server-1.2/extensions/ (adjust as appropriate)

To actually use the backend, you have to add a new type to the e-d-s backend. This is sillily complex, but I haven't gotten around to actually fixing evolution yet. This is done by running (relative to your evolution-data-server build tree) ./libedataserver/test-source-list --key=/apps/evolution/addressbook/sources --add-group="TDB" --set-base-uri="tdb:///home/tfheen/.evolution/addressbook/local". Adjust the/home/tfheen` part if you're not me. You should then be able to add a new address book to the TDB category in Evolution.

Again, feedback is appreciated; this is very much a product of release early, release often so the installation instructions aren't the best. Yet, at least.

Evolution-data-server (or e-d-s for short) seems to be a fairly nice piece of software. It's being more and more integrated with the gnome desktop and other non-gnome applications such as gaim are using it. I prefer to be able to use my tools from the command line and I want to hook e-d-s into gnus so I can actually look up email addresses and maintain that inside of gnus.

I started writing some command line tools tonight and discovered that the API documentation isn't really up to speed. It lacks a lot of documentation. The header files are readable enough that I manage to navigate with just those and a fair amount of trial and error. So far, the command line tool just spits out all the people from all the address books with no way to search or do anything useful with the information, but it's a good start. I just hope integration with bbdb and gnus will go smooth.

I was in tridge's talk on ldb this morning. ldb is a lightweight database with an LDIF/LDAP frontend which can use tdb, "trivial database" as its backend. E-d-s uses Sleepycat DB as the backend, and I have some performance problems there, in addition to the fact that I never liked libdb. I therefore started writing a tdb backend for e-d-s. It's a lot of cut-and-paste from the file backend, but that just means I save a lot of time.

I finally got around to changing my system to a UTF-8 system the other day. It was surprisingly easy, but with a few caveats to not annoy people on Latin-1 IRC channels and such.

Pterm supports UTF8 just fine, but is evidently not smart enough to actually pick a unicode font, so I had to tell it explicitly to use one.

Irssi in stable, testing, unstable, warty and hoary are all too old to have proper recode support, so I packaged irssi 0.8.10rc5 and uploaded that to breezy. This has nice recode support so you can say "please use latin1 while talking to this person". I'll have to fix that on vawad too when I get home.

Apart from that, it meant adjusting a set of dotfiles to not set LANG if it is already set, changing the default in the gdm login screen and fix up the ssh config on vawad to actually allow passthrough of LANG and LC_* environment variables.

I need to adjust my emacs setup too, but that's not too urgent and it is fairly simple to do.

Linux.conf.au is almost over, the penguin dinner was tonight only a few talks and the cleaning-up tomorrow. It has been a great experience, like most conferences and I've learnt a lot. I've also met some old friends and made some new ones, which is usually as what happens. Still missing Karianne a lot and it doesn't really help that we manage to miss each other on IRC about 75% of the time.

The best talk was probably the Linux Kernel Hacking session with Rusty Russel and Robert Love, but a lot of the other ones were interesting too. There has really been too much going on for me to dwelve into everything. I've managed to not get too tired by going to bed fairly early, at least most of the days.

Looking forward to getting to Sydney and UDU.

Second part of the trip went smoothly and was significantly shorter than I expected, only seven hours. Flight was uneventful except for the in-flight entertainment system being completely broken. I ended up spending half the trip listening to country music and the rest listening to easy listening. Food was good, but a little to little. Flight into Sydney about thirty minutes late, but I wouldn't have stood a chance of making it for the final leg into Canberra anyhow with the ten-hour delay out of Amsterdam.

I had a nice experience at immigration when the customs officer asked what kind of conference I was going to, and replied "a Linux conference" he said something along the lines of "We've had a few of those lately". Yay, you can actually say "Linux" to some completely random custom officer and even though he probably doesn't have a clue what it's about, he has at least heard the name.

Qantas was a lovely bunch of people and rebooked my ticket without any extra cost at all, so I'm right now on the bus from the international to the domestic termial. As a bonus, it seems like my X40 is just fine to use even with direct sunshine on the screen. And I have around three hours battery life left, after hacking most of the night.

Looking forward to getting into Canberra, get some food, a shower and a change of clothes. It's warm here with 19 degrees C when we landed at 0645. I hope Canberra will be the same or thereabouts. I miss Karianne already too.

Just a long dinner nap the night before leaving for Australia, then no sleep until I was on the airport coach which left at 0500. Plane trip to Amsterdam went smoothly, as usual, but there the problems started. My flight out of Amsterdam was delayed ten hours, so instead of leaving at 1200, it left at 2200. I got to spend a whole day in Schiphol airport and was really tired of waiting and doing nothing when the flight finally took off, a bit late that too.

KLM screwed me a bit, first by not offering me food vouchers, which their own rules say they should (and they should actually offer them and not juts give them out when people ask for them). Then, since they couldn't sell me inter-australian tickets, my ticket is only valid for going to Sydney, not the full way to Canberra. I had therefore bought a ticket from Sydney to Canberra, but KLM basically said "sorry, not our problem" when I told them about this. I wonder if the Qantas people will be good enough to reroute my ticket or give me a discount or something, since I doubt very much I'll make it for my 0630 flight.

Apart from that, the travel was ok and it was actually better to fly in the evening than the morning, since I always sleep on planes and this got me to sleep through the night instead of sleeping a day and then being awake the next night. Food was unusually good, leg-room ok. Nice stewardesses and stewards. The in-flight entertainment wasn't too good, since it wasn't on-demand, just a bunch of different movies being played over and over. I got a pair of earphones with noise reduction in Amsterdam and they worked really, really well, both for hearing better and not being so tired of the airplane noise.

Now on to the next leg of the trip, actually crossing the equator.

Yesterday was all about breaking and not getting stuff to work properly. First, I broke pkg-config with the 0.17 release. The pkg.m4 included there broke because I'm a twit and misunderstood what James Henstridge said and then failed to test the changes properly. 0.17.1 was released this morning to fix this issue as well as the backwards test for whether inter-library dependencies are supported or not.

Later in the day, I fumbled around with getting LaTeX to frame a part of my thesis with a shaded background. After a lot off googling around, I found framed.sty which does what I want without any fuss. Yay. Now I'll just have to actually write the content.

Right now, I'm fixing up stuff again. Jeff Bailey is fixing some bugs in mkinitrd for us at work, which is kinda cool to watch through a shared screen session. IRC + shared screen is fun.

A long time since I blogged in the diary part of my blog. A lot of stuff has happened, most notably Karianne and I are now enganged (and have been for about three weeks). On Saturday, we finally got our rings after the jeweler had messed up twice: first they mispelt our names, then they wrote my name in my ring and Karianne in her ring, which is obviously wrong. This time, they got it right.

I've been working on securing the network here at home since some other person in the neighbourhood has taken to running peer-to-peer applications which kills my router (and my bandwidth). I don't mind people using my network, but I do mind people abusing it. The setup is now a bridged OpenVPN and I'm going to set up a captive portal so people using my network will at least know the terms. If that doesn't help, I can always limit the bandwidth or cut the connection off completely. I'm hoping to avoid the latter since I think having open wireless hotspots is a good thing for the community at large.

I was supposed to fix both ia32-libs and the mailman packages, but didn't manage to get around to it. Hoping to do that tomorrow instead.

When I grew up, terrorism was hijacking planes, attacking civilians like the 1972 Olympics attack by Black September and stuff like that. The people of Vietnam weren't terrorists, they were freedom fighters or at least guerilla fighters fighting France, then the US. The mujahedin in Afghanistan likewise, except they were fighting the Soviets.

After 2001-11-09 that changed. The quintuple hijiack was more of a coordinated assault than a "regular" terrorist attack. A bit like high-tech one-shot guerilla warfare in somebody else's country. Even though it was "too big" to be labeled a terrorist attack, I don't have a problem with calling it that. In the aftermath however, more or less any disruptive activity is labelled terrorism.

Sharing movies and music with peer-to-peer technologies is now terrorism, demonstrating for or against something is terrorism. Open source is terrorism. The people in Iraq who are trying to eject the US armed forces from the country are all labeled terrorists, even though it's the US forces who invaded the country an instantiated a government fairly undemocratically. I'm not agreeing with them attacking the US forces in any way, but they are not terrorists. They might be insurgent or rebels, though.

This makes me sad, not only because people go about being scared about terrorism all the time, being blown to pieces, but also because it makes the word unusable for what it is meant to describe.

So, please don't use the word terrorism unless you actually mean terrorism.

It was nice and non-raining when I rode my bike to the university last night. When I left in the evening, it wasn't so nice any more, raining and everything. In addition, somebody had stolen my rear bike fender. Silly, stupid people.

It's not that a big of an issue, it's not a huge amount of money, but it's still very annoying that people just steal things.