Tollef Fog Heen's blog

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.