Elfyn McBratney, beu, (by the way, good work on the marriage!) very kindly nominated me for the Gentoo council. I'm happy to accept this nomination.

Well, usual rubbish as far as reasoning goes: I feel I'd be able to communicate well between projects and developers, and I think that... well, I'd enjoy the job. There's not much more to it than that.

Good luck to the other candidates.

Quick, a bandwagon!

In response to Greg's question, this is my desk:

Notice a few things:

• My camera sucks. It's a Vivitar that I got for free one day. Actually, I didn't get it for free, someone else got it for free and didn't want it it was so bad. Sorry.
• There's an Ultra2 on my desk.
• There's an iRiver H340 on my desk. Greg seems to have the PMP player though -- is that the Windows CE one or the Linux-based one?
• I love my headphones. They are Grado SR80s.

This morning I discovered net-mail/t-prot. It's specifically designed for mutt users, but it should work with other MUAs, providing they're not one of these new fangled bloated graphical things.

Anyway, here's a URL: URL

The idea behind it was originally just to filter out classic TOFU, that is, "text oben, full-quote unten". This is a mish-mash of German and English meaning "text above -- full quote below", or just top posting to the rest of us.

However, t-prot filters out more than just TOFU. It gets rid of Outlook garbage and it can trim commercial and mailing list footers (or whatever footer you like). It can truncate RFC uncomformant signatures that are over four lines long. It does a bunch of other things too: trimming whitespace, repeated punctuation, blank lines, etc.

The best bit is that because it's just used as a display_filter in mutt, the original mail is unchanged. This means there're no strings attached, so try it out.

Just for the hell of it, here's a screenshot before (left) and after (right). Click on the images for full-size, if you're bored.

Interestingly, the person having their mail snipped by t-prot for having a huge RFC unconformant signature is also part of the ASCII ribbon campaign. It takes all sorts, I suppose.

Spider, I would recommend media-sound/synaesthesia for audio visualisation -- presuming you're using x86. It's not at all portable.

As for the desktop side of things, one man's flashy desktop isn't necessarily anothers. I'd say stick with stock gnome as far as possible. XComposite drop shadows always look good with it.

As we all know, there are many sendmail compatible MTAs in Portage. Many users want to have these installed in tandem, so Gentoo provides an ebuild for BSD mailwrapper, enabled with the mailwrapper global USE flag. However, in comparison to... well... the rest of Gentoo, mailwrapper doesn't really fit in that well. Having to comment/uncomment things in /etc/mail/mailer.conf is inconvenient and a hassle.

I woke up with a hangover a few Saturdays ago and while I was in the shower I had a bit of an idea: to provide a tool that creates symlinks for each MTA. I drafted an RFC and sent it into net-mail@gentoo.org. The idea behind it is to have a mailer.conf-style configuration file (I've called these profiles in the RFC, just for the sake of it) provided by each MTA. These are installed in /etc/mail/ and then a symlink is created to /etc/mail/mailer.conf so that no modifications to net-mail/mailwrapper are necessary.

As a result, no user is going to have to mess around with etc-update and /etc/mail/mailer.conf, nor will they have to worry about editing it by hand. They'll just use a simple tool, mailer-config, to change which MTA is in use.

Expect it to reach Portage in the next week (or maybe even earlier).

I recently brought two new developers on board: Joe Sapp, A.K.A. nixphoeni (gdesklets) and Jory Pratt A.K.A. anarchy (qmail/vpopmail). Both seem to be settling in well.

I've bumped mail-mta/msmtp to 1.4.0. I think I'm the luckiest maintainer in the world with the package's upstream, a chap called Martin Lambers, who:

• Autotools his packages properly
• Announces releases on sourceforge and freshmeat in particular so I can track them easily
• Uses Gentoo
• Is active on the bugzilla
• Is a nice guy and easily approachable over email
• Writes good software (features, portability, good code, etc.)

It makes things very easy for me, and takes a lot of the nasty bits out of maintaing packages. I've gotten Markus Rothe (corsair), who is a PPC64 developer, to keyword 1.4.0 ~ppc64 too. In the next release, I'm going to try and push the current version to stable on all architectures so I can purge all the horrible old ebuilds without mailwrapper support.

I've convinced Simon Stelling (blubb) to add gtk-engines to emul-linux-x86-gtklibs. This means that anyone using the multilibbed GTK+ applications (the latest acroread, firefox-bin etc.) will not have to endure warnings about missing GTK+ theme engine modules on the command line, so long as they are using a GTK+ theme that uses an engine shipped with GNOME. Also, these programs will look a hell of a lot better.

Other than what I've mentioned, I haven't really done much. I've been enjoying winding down from school this Easter holiday. Back on Monday though.

In this post, Donnie mentioned the use of various spam filters and IMAP proxies.

I don't know about other people, but most of the spam I receive is in character sets that I can't even read. So, it only takes one simple procmail rule to filter them all out:

:0
* Content-Type:.*(big5|gb2312|euc-kr|ks_c_5601-1987).*
/dev/null

It makes sense to put this sort of thing before your spam filters, as it will use nowhere near the resources.

Just got back home after my flight back from Manchester. I'm very tired, but I'll do my best to scribble down a few things. I apologise for not having any photographs, but there is a video/DVD in the pipeline.

Rob Holland (tigger^) gave a great talk on code auditing, in particular with doxygen and his work with that. The slides were a bit rough and ready (hehe), but it was excellently presented nonetheless. He didn't even swear once.

Stephen Bennett (spb) showed me and a few other people Gentoo/FreeBSD with the Gentoo init script system. Really quite impressive.

Daniel Drake (dsd) presented the kernel and user-relations projects. I think the talk will help a lot of users to report better bugs in the future, and maybe even George will sort out his DMA access now.

My talk was really rather scary for me and I was quite nervous (and unprepared!); I think it went fairly well though. The Zsh demo at the end seemed to get a few oohs and aahs.

Harry Moyes, a guest speaker from manchesterwireless.net, gave a talk on the process of setting up a charity in the UK, and the details thereof.

Also thanks to Gareth Bult for his talk on Flash Linux. It was really informative, and it looks like a very useful and interesting Gentoo-based distribution.

Thanks to the organisers, Stuart Herbert (Stuart) and Reuben Finch (grumpydog), for putting so much time and effort into the event. I'm looking forward to next year very much :).

you can find my talk in both LaTeX and PDF on my devspace. Compilation to any format other than PDF probably won't work (you'll need app-text/tetex or similar and dev-tex/latex-beamer at least, and also I would recommend dev-tex/rubber)

This is my first time writing a web log to an audience, but planet.gentoo.org seems to be a great way for the developers to communicate with users and for the users to keep up with what's going on in Gentoo.

Anyway, at the moment I'm writing my talk and slides for the Gentoo UK Conference 2005 and things seem to be going quite smoothly. I've been a bit pressed for time lately, so the talk-writing has been postponed and put-off till I've been able. I definitely think it's time to get stuck in now; I've only got about a day left to prepare for the talk, which is going to last for an hour :). For those that are interested, the slides are being written in LaTeX with the beamer package. You may even find some demo PDFs on my developer webspace, /temp, although these aren't complete or final.

I'm also enjoying getting my Ultra 2 machine up and running. It's a 2x300MHz UltraSPARC II box, with 256MB RAM and two 4.2GB discs. It's been great fun to play around with some non-PC hardware and it's going to be very useful, as a lot of the smaller net-mail packages are missing ~sparc keywords. I can now test on these. After the saga with a crappy 13W3 adapter, it's great to finally get the thing working.

I'm currently running through the recruiting process with a couple of new developers, and next on the list is Homer Parker (hparker). He's probably going to be set up by tonight, so don't forget to reply to my announcement for him on the gentoo-dev mailing list and wish him well!