This isn’t a great looking URL, but hopefully it will continue to work into the future: this is a Bongo group on Mugshot. At the moment, it’s just me – I wanted to try Mugshot out before I got into all the GNOME online desktop stuff that people are working on, but others are free to join in. The web swarm looks a particularly fun idea for sharing links we think are interesting.
Chris Lord has posted an essay entitled “Introducing Social Calendaring” which I think is an interesting read for Bongans. It took me a couple of reads of the paper to actually figure out what was being proposed, but that’s probably because I skimmed it first a few times with my own preconceived idea of what was being proposed.
I would love to see some of these ideas implemented in Bongo, although I don’t know to what extent some of it would work. While I like some of the proposals in the paper, it is a shame that there was no kind of implementation work, because there are a couple of things I really think deserve more analysis (this might not make too much sense until you read Chris’ paper):
First post after being “away” – my server was down for a little while too :/ No matter, I wasn’t really in a position to blog anyway. Real life has interrupted for a bit, although I’ve managed a bit of hacking to distract myself.
So, we’ve had various troubles with IMAP. Somewhat hilariously, although I wrote a message to -devel about this, I did it from my trunk Bongo, which doesn’t actually send e-mail since the smtpc code was committed (which I think is a configuration issue over here rather than a bug of Pat’s). So, d’oh to that. I’ll blog about this instead, then.
I do love a good diagram, and I noticed that I have a number of Bongo-related diagrams stuck on my hard-drive. Most of them have seen action in a past blog post of mine, but my blog isn’t really a Bongo development resource, and the ones which haven’t yet been seen really ought to be a bit more widely available.
In general, though, programmers aren’t great at drawing things and worse, updating diagrams in drawing programs is often tedious and time-consuming. So, I’ve committed some graphviz support into our build system which runs when you build the development documentation.
So, Bongo didn’t make it into Google’s Summer of Code, but we did get some nice feedback from them. There’s good news and bad news 🙂
The good news is that they thought our application was very well done, and it was basically because they don’t have room for everyone that we didn’t get in: it sounds like we would have been acceptable, it just wasn’t our roll of the die. Unfortunate, but fair enough – I do suspect that Google have a theme or themes for each GSoC, and it might just be that we didn’t fit well this year.
… today is World Water Day. There is a flashy 2007 website too, not sure why.
Planet Debian has been a trove of green discussion today. Russell Coker and MJ both linked to a story about Spain getting most of its energy from wind, for the first time. 27% of their energy came from wind, 22% came from nucular power and 16% from coal power (where the other third came from, I’m not totally clear on – possibly imported?). Overall, in the last year, almost 10% of their energy has come from wind. I think that’s pretty amazing, especially since it meant for that small time, almost 50% of their power was coming from relatively carbon-clean sources.
There has been a little bit of Bongo hacking. In an ideal world, Pat would get with the programme and get himself a blog. People should keep bugging him on IRC to start blogging, and he could be writing some of this stuff instead of me 🙂
First up, the big connio-on-GNUTLS patch has landed. Pat has worked extremely hard on this, and while I’ve helped out on some setup stuff, it’s basically his work. This means that connio-using agents now use GNU TLS as their secure sockets and TLS implementation (pretty much, SMTP is the only renegade).
Last weekend I started looking at Hawkeye, prompted mostly by the need for people to be able to change the config for Bongo while we’re putting the new config system in place.
After a bit of hacking last night, it’s finally at the stage where it does something useful! You can run it under bongo-standalone (previously this wasn’t possible), you can log in as a user, and you can enable or disable agents from startup.
There’s nothing which divides hackers so much as HTML as a format for sending mail. However, a recent discussion on another mailing list makes me think that there is hope for it.
I should state up-front that I’m very much in favour of HTML as a mail format. I outlined a couple of the technical reasons why in my posting on the subject, but it can be summarised mainly to:
- it’s the sanest way to work in web mail;
- done right, HTML enables editors and viewers to do much smarter things.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think plain text is going away – in fact, there are many popular examples of it (witness SMS text messaging and, to some extent, instant messaging, Facebook wall posts, etc.). But it’s also not the be-all and end-all of communication: the richer presentation and semantic of well-structured HTML isn’t to be sniffed at.
