Monthly Archives: March 2002

Did a bit more mail system hacking, and wrote a filter to get mailman to talk to SpamAssassin directly: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=534577&group_id=103&atid=300103 This one asks spamd to score each message that is posted to a list. If the message goes above a particular score (configurable, default 10), it gets discarded. If it goes above another threshold (default 5), the message gets held for moderation. It probably needs a bit more tweaking to skip posts from listmembers (among other things). I mainly wrote this patch because the PyGTK mailing list currently gets more spam than real messages, which is a bit depressing, and a pain to moderate.

Made new development releases of pygtk and gnome-python recently. The previous ones didn't work with the gtk 2.0 release (trivial to fix up). Since the release, I have done some clean ups to its code generator. I have refactored it so that the 4 code paths used to generate wrappers for GObject, GInterface, GBoxed and GPointer type classes are now merged into one code path. This shortened the file by 500 lines, and should make it easier to add new features. The previous layout was getting pretty hard to manage. I have started using Spam Assassin to tag incomming spam. As we have a mildly unusual mail setup (postfix with Cyrus IMAP), I ended up writing my own script to perform the spam checking. The result was a script that could be called as a "deliver" script by postfix for local delivery. The script would then pass the message off to the spamd daemon for spam checking, then pass the message on to the IMAP server via LMTP. The script is probably useful for use with other mail servers supporting LMTP. The script is attached to the following bug report: http://bugzilla.spamassassin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=112 This has the benefit of only checking incomming mail, and allowing postfix to handle outgoing and transit mail at full speed as before. Next thing to try is adding spam checking support to Mailman (as the local delivery program doesn't get called for messages sent to mailman). It should be possible to set it up to reject messages above a certain threshold, and hold messages at a lower threshold. I wish I started looking at these tools earlier. Spam volume has gone up sharply in the last 6 months, and shows no sign of flattening out.

linux.conf.au Got asked to go on the paper review committee for next year's linux.conf.au. This should be interesting. For people living in Europe, it should cut off about 5 hours flying time compared to the eastern states, so hopefully we will get some cool European hackers submitting papers. Conversely, flights from the US will most likely be longer. If you have never been to Perth, it is a great opportunity to come (it is a great place). If you live in Perth, it will be a great opportunity to meet many interesting people without > 4 hours flight :-). Also, check out the video on the website if you haven't yet. GNOME 2.0 The GNOME release is looking pretty good. Things have been shaping up quite well. The new stable GTK+ release is scheduled for Monday. There have been significant speed improvements to Nautilus (some due to improvements to the UI handler code in bonobo). Libglade is shaping up well. Guadec is about a month away as well. Python The development pygtk branch is going well. Most of the infrastructure is in place, and it is pretty usable (except threading, which is still a little broken). I my first patch into python recently. It allows use of non string types as the __doc__ attribute of new style classes (eg. unicode strings, or arbitrary descriptors (which is what I wanted)). It should be going in both the 2.3 and 2.2.1 releases. The gettext module in the standard library is also partially based on my code (along with the other gettext wrappers that were around at the time), but that is really Barry's work. I should look at the bug about building libpython as a shared library, as it would be required to implement a full gnome-vfs wrapper. raph: hopefully pygtk 2.0 should be a pretty good choice when it is ready. GTK+ 2.0 should work on win32, and I have gotten rid of the file naming issues and global variable referencing issues (MSVC doesn't allow referencing variables from other DLLs in global variable definitions. However, the C++ compiler does. It is a bit weird) people were having with the stable pygtk. Also, the Redmond95 windows lookalike theme has been improved a fair bit. Mozilla Looks like the patch to fix font handling for PS printing (#37685) is going in to mozilla 0.9.9. This should make printing on unix mozilla much better. Finally, preformatted text should finally be displayed in a monospace font. Previously, the generic font types (sans serif, serif and monospace) were all being printed as Times.