Quick notes today 2012/02/05

Some quick thoughts after hearing the news today:

• The Vietnam government had increased the “túi ni-lon” (a type of reusable, unrecyclable and unbiodegradable plastic bag) tax to 100% to reduce the use of them but there is no good result at the moment, since they don’t propose any good alternative (in quality, convenience, and cost) to “túi ni-lon”.
• News about the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln’s heading through the Strait of Hormuz. Taking the a great peacemaker to name a war machine is morally unacceptable. And no, there is no excuse for that, there is no peace in war.

Closures in newLISP

From rickboy’s reply^[1]:

John McCarthy has died

Source: ycombinator^[1]

mtraven^[2] wrote:

“Here lies a Lisper
Uninterned from this mortal package
Yet not gc’d
While we retain pointers to his memory”

Thank you all, prof. McCarthy. May you rest in peace. Your Lisp has changed my life forever!

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3151233
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mtraven

Hanoi Coding Dojo Session 7

I intended to blog about this session yesterday but I was too deep in writing a unit testing framework for newLISP[1] and forgot all about the time :-). Well, here is a quick note about our last Coding Dojo[2] session.

Random Thoughts

After some recent events, I realized that my coding skills are not as good as I thought. Crappy environment, heavily rely on tools, do not understand the language which I familiar with the most, … I’m no better than V$ coders…

Hanoi Coding Dojo Session 4

My entry @ HanoiLUG Blog (http://blog.hanoilug.org/?p=124)

At the end of a week

Gnome 3 release party, HAOI updates, my Japanese…

I’m back!

It’s been a while since the last day I visited my blog. I always wanted to write again but kept being lazy. Yeah, I was lazy and I feared. I feared of writing…

Not it is not (really) GNOME, it is Unity

Canonical is bloody hell good!

Gave up on Mutt

After a while playing with Mutt, I decide to give up on it. Its motto “this one sucks less”, well, sucks, at least for me. With literal months trying to configure and master it, I’m quite disappointed. Now I become to hate it for some main reasons:

• Mutt is just slow, especially with large mailboxes. Even with header caching, it’s still damn slow. Unacceptable!
• Error at random accessing moments: “tls_socket_read (A TLS packet with unexpected length was received)”. From some bugs report like this one, it’s GNUTLS’s fault. Mutt’s fault is not to play with it very well. Mailboxes close with syncing, failing to download (large) attachments.
• Limitted viewing settings. Basically, I couldn’t make a column view where I can read message and view my inboxes at the same time.
• Mailboxes randomly close for no reasons.
• After reading messages, I always had to sync before deleting. Otherwise, I would get the message “Mailbox was externally modified. Flags may be wrong.”, and the flags were really wrong.
• Attachments could not be separated from messages in a sense that I have to download all the attachments before I can read the message. This is pretty annoying when I just want to read the message but not downloading the attachments.
• Unusable without Internet connection or the help of an external program like offlineimap, …

Now, come back to the world of email clients. I used to use Mozilla Thunderbird for a long time and it did not fit my need, so few configurable features, not consider a huge memory usage. Novell Evolution is no exception. Claw-mail seems good but it has no plan to really support Maildir at the moment. I love Emacs but I don’t want to be at risk with Gnus. Wanderlust looks cool but no matter how hard I do, I could not get it to work with the unmaintained flim, apel, and semi. I tried offlineimap and liked it, but it suffers from huge memory leak and cpu usage. The git version is no longer maintained, and does not work at all. What now?

The first thought that comes to me is to write my own email client, the client just for my own need, with SBCL or Elisp. The second choice is to try to fix offlineimap.

Well, after a couple days thinking, I decide to give offlineimap another shot by forking it and fixing it. In case I fail, you guys would have another “less suck” email client, well, hopefully :-).