Entries from October 2005 ↓

I got this mail today

Dear Srinivasan Shreyas,

Yey!

Its a nice comfortable evening and i was just chilling when a mail triggered me off. I am member of this yahoo group called
Films for Freedom and it so happened a couple of days back some girl accidently sent a join join Hi 5 invite to the group. This is because hi5 do the cunning thing
of asking for your mail account password while creating an account and
then use that to extract your contacts and then mail all of them. I mean
that sucks by itself and is a gross intrusion of privacy considering
they can do other stuff with my password, but wait the story does not end yet..

So the girl lets call her “some-blah” sends a mail which reads

Mail 1:

Hi

Regards
some-blah

This is ok just a small mistake, so didnt worry me much, then something that irritates the hell out of me happened. Some random guy lets call
him “lone-idiot” mails the group which reads…

Mail 2:

hey some-blah,

lone-idiot

Now this ticked me off, i have absoluetely no problems in that dude
hitting on her, infact i find it normal. What i cant digest is the fact that he mailed the whole list with it. Also documentaries are my
holy ground and if anyone messes with the spirit of the place i get really nasty..

So i did a “REPLY ALL”

Mail 3:

Hey lone-idiot,

Cheers,
Shreyas

*phew, i hope he does not reply because i am in mood to rip the guy apart.

So, I have always been a bit sceptical of gdb. It consistently screws up traces when there are a number of threads. Worse in case of deadlocks ( mutex, semaphore etc), its even more useless.

I have been looking at this bug on and off for 30 mins now and i convinced gdb is lying. There is a lock up somwhere and when i break gdb says it breaks at fsync (bleh), but of course when i try to break on the function which actually uses fsync then gdb doesn’t break at that function at all. I want to dive into fixing this but i dont want to break the vow that “i wont touch/ fix/ read evolution code this week”. So for now it will have to be..

All requests to add feeds to the planet will be cc’ed to the foss.in list from now on. Please dont send me private mails it wont work.

Also when you write a mail, please mention your role in the event and also your contributions for the event.

It is not necessary to make direct contributions to the event to get on the planet. Well wishers and advocators of the event are most welcome to join the Planet. Please state your indulgence with the event when you mail the list.

I would look at the following qualities for the event.

• Contribution in terms of ideas, hard work or moral support
• Participation in the event either as speaker or some such event related activity
• Support for the event either in terms of helping organizing it or motivating others to organize it.

I am open to other qualities which will be considered on a per case basis.

And please remember,

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance.” ~Saul Bellow

I did not do anything useful today. Just lazed all day procrastonating on the things to do, overwhelmed by the backlog but proceeded to waste the remaining time anyway.

Moral: Dont procrastinate, do what needs to be done.

I have been pondering if mail has become such an integral part of our desktop usage that its time it got elevated to a desktop operation.

A large part of the users, use mail extensively, so why should a seperate application handle mail ? Why shouldn’t the desktop handle the mail itself. Lets for instance take “Creation of a new folder” thats a desktop operation but i create more new mails than folders in a day. The usual process in writing a new mail would be as follows

• To open your mail client (pine, evolution, thunderbird, outlook (jeez!))
• Wait for the irritating splash screen to go away.
• Wait for all your new mail to filter through
• click new mail.

Why does the whole process have to be so complicated when its extensively used ? why cant we just have a right click “new mail” like right click “new folder”. This is what i meant by mail being a Desktop APi. This solves a lot of problems.

• Complete choice to use different ui but the same mail backend.
• Great Desktop integration as all application can then use the mail data
• General coolness of usage and less time staring at splash up screens
• I can think of a hundred applets which can make life easier. Like for instance a script which reads today’s calendar entries and makes it your desktop background and updates it when new entries come in.
• Mailing somebody from gaim should be easy one click composer option rather than launching the whole mail app

Ofcourse this also presents some rather difficult to handle problems.

• The ipc mecahnisim between the mail ui and the mail backend should be able to handle large amounts of data in a robust manner.
• The mail backend should run as a daemon, so if u are running a 200mhz machine then forget it. Although i suggest u update

I find it a really interesting topic. Maybe i should hack on a prototype, but its rather hard to do right now because of how evolution is designed and bonobo’s general tardiness while handling large amount of data but its certainly something which could seperate the Gnome desktop from the rest.

“If you cannot-in the long run-tell everyone what you have been doing, your doing has been worthless”

Erwin Schrodinger

*Amen*… All those times and thoughts wasted at doing something which was always improbable, seems like such a waste of time today. Oh well, another lesson learnt.