Tue, 30 Oct 2007
Hope from the One Laptop Per Child Project mailing list
improve their lives via effort
That's a good motto.
Tue, 23 Oct 2007
Adding a Website: header to Mailman messages
Very often, I like to quote mailing list messages to people not on those mailing lists. Mailman is a common mailing list program, and Pipermail is commonly used for storing archives. What ends up happening is that I fish around for the archive link and spend a minute or two figuring out which message it is.
So I wrote a short program to do that scraping for me. You can check it out (literally, if you want, with svn) at the mail_tools directory - look for add_mailman_website_header.py and sample_message.
Why the "Website:" header? Thunderbird seems to show that by default, so that's one less configuration option I have to change. (To match this, I changed my alpine config to show it too.)
You may also want to look at the procmailrc snippets I use to insert it into the mail processing pipeline. Embarrassingly, configuring procmail to set it up took as long as writing this thing; it's been way too long....
## <Mailman header addition> :0 W MAILMAN_URL=| python ~/svn/public/code/mail_tools/add_mailman_website_header.py go :0 Waf | formail -b -A "Website: $MAILMAN_URL" ## </Mailman>
One more thing: If you run it with 0 arguments, it does a self-unittest (which in a few days will give false negatives; maybe that'll encourage me to improve the program, but probably not!). Hence I give it the meaningless argument "go". It also waits for a configurable (45s by default) amount of time for the pipermail index to get updated, as in real-world tests it beat the pipermail index for the two list messages.
Screenshot: Before
Here's some mail without the header:ALPINE 0.9999 MESSAGE TEXT Folder: INBOX Message 5 of 7 90% + Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 19:29:59 -0700 From: Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> To: sf-lug@linuxmafia.com Subject: Re: [sf-lug] FWIW and :r! dig -t ns sf-lug.com Quoting Christian Einfeldt (einfeldt@gmail.com): > Learning vi is really hard, though. "vimtutor" is your friend. Until then, think of it as "vi vi vi, the editor of the Beast." _______________________________________________ sf-lug mailing list sf-lug@linuxmafia.com http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/sf-lug ? Help < MsgIndex P PrevMsg - PrevPage D Delete R Reply O OTHER CMDS > ViewAttch N NextMsg Spc NextPage U Undelete F Forward
Screenshot: After
ALPINE 0.99 MESSAGE TEXT Folder: INBOX Message 5 of 7 86% + From: Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> To: sf-lug@linuxmafia.com Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 19:29:59 -0700 Subject: Re: [sf-lug] FWIW and :r! dig -t ns sf-lug.com Website: http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2007q4/002523.html Quoting Christian Einfeldt (einfeldt@gmail.com): > Learning vi is really hard, though. "vimtutor" is your friend. Until then, think of it as "vi vi vi, the editor of the Beast." _______________________________________________ sf-lug mailing list sf-lug@linuxmafia.com http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/sf-lug ? Help < MsgIndex P PrevMsg - PrevPage D Delete R Reply O OTHER CMDS > ViewAttch N NextMsg Spc NextPage U Undelete F Forward
[/note/software] permanent link
Announce and discuss lists
I have a habit of entring a community and leaving both an announce and a discuss list wherever I go. The wisdom of this is still unresolved. I thought I'd share one thing I do beyond that: set the reply-to header on the announce list to go to the discuss list.
That way, when there's an announcement and the peanut gallery wants to add something, they'll reply and the people interested in hearing more will hear it.
I remembered this upon reading that the BALUG lists have the same sort of split, and that in particular that they were considering (on an opt-out basis) auto-adding people from discuss to announce.
Update 2007-10-24: It actually works now. I worked around what appears to be a bug in the Python email module. Report pending. I'll post a screenshot in a day or two and call this project a success, except for all the other non-Mailman services to index.
Mon, 22 Oct 2007
Rocking the vote
I was reading about Poland and the article used the caption "Rocking the Vote" for a movie. Huh, I wondered. I don't think there's any rock and roll here.
And then I figured out that "Rocking the vote" sounds like "rocking the boat".
Addendum: Page 2 does, indeed, talk about the Polish MTV channel. Says Kasia Szajewska of Wybieram.pl:
“In the States you have Rock the Vote,” she said. “They’re really happy to have something similar.”
Thu, 18 Oct 2007
Ubuntu and Debian
Meh! That is totally untrue. Debian was obsolete long before Ubuntu existed.
Thu, 11 Oct 2007
Reverse smileys
Kristian Hermansen sent an email to the San Francisco Linux Users Group list expressing shock at my "reverse smileys". Others have, too, so let me take a moment to explain.
Some time around 1995, I started using AOL. (I also stopped some time in the same century.) I learned important vocabulary like "a/s/l" and "rofl" and PC Magazine sent me a free mousepad with Windows 95 hotkeys like "Windows+R" for the Run dialog box. Then our free month expired, and we went on to some other network.
Eventually I got into IM, and I started messaging friends routinely. I got into the habit of making complicated smileys - my favorite was Abe Lincoln: =|:-)= [source]. And some time later on, the smileys started getting turned into pictures. It may have been cool that :-) turned into a picture of a smiling yellow face, but I found it offensive that (a) they (AOL) started doing this without asking me, on other people's computers, so I had no idea how my emoticon was going to be displayed, and (b) that they would totally corrupt smileys like Mr. Lincoln.
So I retaliated. I came up with two counter-attacks. The first was the smartest: :-) would not get graphicalized, I realized. (View the source if it's not clear how that works.) That worked fine in media where I had rich formatting (HTML), but would fail me in emails. It was great for confusing my IMees, for whom it looked like a regular, old-school smiley, except all the other old-school smileys had gone away in favor of yellow circles with black lines and points.
The other way was more drastic and, instead of hiding between the lines, vocally made the point that not all smileys needed to be graphicalized. That was to reverse the smiley. I don't know when I started doing that, but it's probably some time between 1998 and 2000.
I also liked to abuse smileys to make grinning asides in emails. (-; You might wonder why asides needed to grin; usually they wink instead! ;-) I don't know if that idea came before or after I started making backwards smileys in the first place. I don't do this as much now in large part to me having seen Thunderbird turn my closing smileys into lame yellow things that ruin the symmetry.
One day during natural language processing, Jason Eisner said in class that he thought people who did the above thing (presumably without knowing I did it) were making an NLP joke. That added to the feeling that NLP was right up my alley.
All in all, smileys have been a big part of my online life. It's only fitting that the EFF and They Might Be Giants contributed to this post.
Mon, 01 Oct 2007
A strong recommendation
On the flip side, I know alot about the IMAP protocol now so perhaps one day that will help me - hopefully a new protocol will come along to replace it though.
-- Andrew Snow
