the arc of software bends towards understanding
I acquired a Google Nexus 7 (Wi-Fi only) over winter break. I don’t really like getting new devices: they invariably require a lot of work to setup to my liking. Here are some notes: Jailbreaking the device from Linux is still fiddly. Ultimately, it’s probably easiest to just find a Windows box and use the […]
On the prompting of Steven Hum, I've put some finishing touches on my Sup patchset and am “releasing” it to the world (more on what I mean by “release” shortly.) The overall theme of this patchset is that it integrates as much Sup metadata it can with Maildir data. In particular: It merges Damien Leone’s […]
October has come, and with it, another Ubuntu release (12.10). I finally gave in and reinstalled my system as 64-bit land (so long 32-bit), mostly because graphics were broken on my upgraded system. As far as I could tell, lightdm was dying immediately after starting up, and I couldn't tell where in my copious configuration […]
(Last IMAP themed post for a while, I promise!) Well, first off, you’re horribly misinformed: you do not actually want to hack on IMAP. But supposing, for some masochistic reason, you need to dig in the guts of your mail synchronizer and fix a bug or add some features. There are a few useful things […]
I am going to share a dirty little secret with you, a secret that only someone who uses and hacks on OfflineIMAP could reasonably know: OfflineIMAP sucks. Of course, you can still use software that sucks (I do all the time), but it’s useful to know what some of its deficiencies are, so that you […]
As software engineers, we are trained to be a little distrustful of marketing copy like this: OfflineIMAP is SAFE; it uses an algorithm designed to prevent mail loss at all costs. Because of the design of this algorithm, even programming errors should not result in loss of mail. I am so confident in the algorithm […]
It is once again time for Ubuntu upgrades. I upgraded from Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot to Ubuntu Precise Pangolin (12.04), which is an LTS release. Very few things broke (hooray!) The Monospace font changed to something new, with very wide glyph size. The old font was DejaVuSansMono, which I switched back to. Xournal stopped compiling; somehow […]
This is a very quick and easy fix that has made latency on Ubuntu servers I maintain go from three to four seconds to instantaneous. If you've noticed that you have high latency on ssh or scp (or even other software like remctl), and you have control over your server, try this on the server: […]
An “easy”, two-step process: Apply this patch for i686. (Why they haven't fixed this in the trunk, I have no idea.) Configure with CFLAGS="-U_FORTIFY_SOURCE -fno-stack-protector -O2" (this disables fortify source and stack protection which Ubuntu enables by default but interferes with glibc. You need to keep optimizations on, because glibc won't build without it.) You’ll […]
Things I should be working on: graduate school personal statements. What I actually spent the last five hours working on: transparent xmobar. It uses the horrible “grab Pixmap from root X window” hack. You can grab the patch here but I haven’t put in enough effort to actually make this a configurable option; if you […]