use Perl

How do you get your iPhone 3G wallpaper onto the "Home" or "Applications" screen? There's a screenshot of this on the iphonefaq web site, but my "Wallpaper" just seems to apply to the iPhone "lock" page.

I'm currently testing GyazMail. It's a little slow at pulling the messages from the IMAP server, but apart from that appears to do everything I want, and my desktop is no longer grinding along at snails pace.

I hate mail clients. Really there's no good one I've found yet.

Yesterday I got sick of Mail.app spinning disk for no good reason whatsoever. Yes OK, so I have an IMAP system with several gigs of mail in it, but pine copes just fine with it. When Mail.app is chugging I can run fs_usage and see that it's just a blur of "Mail" entries.

So first I tried Opera Mail. That's OK-ish, but it's so integrated with the browser that it doesn't obey your default browser setting for links, and had a number of other weaknesses that I couldn't live with (like it didn't like hierarchical folders in IMAP).

Then I thought I'd give Thunderbird another go. I actually use this as my PC mail client when I'm forced to use Windows, so I figured I'd give it a go.

My mail client has to be able to do a few things that I've become used to:

1) Sort threads by most-recent-arrival. This is absolutely critical - why would I want a new mail arriving to be attached to a thread WAY up in my scrolly view? Now ThreadBubble promises some of this, but it requires you sort by Date and not arrival time - which is utterly broken since so many systems produce incorrect dates on mails, that when I enabled it there were a bunch of completely out of order threads at the bottom of my subject pane. Plus it didn't seem to entirely work. For what it's worth, the feature I want is a more than 3 year old bug in Thunderbird, and not even due for 3.0a1.

Oh, and if it could do Mail.app's method of grouping by thread but just showing in arrival order that would be bliss (alpine now offers this).

2) Integration with iCal and calendar invites from my windows-using colleagues.

3) Cope with going offline without nagging. Due to my VPN/Firewall situation at work, things regularly disconnect, so it needs to cope with that without nagging. This is currently a showstopper with me for thunderbird.

4) Good fast search. For some bizarre reason Mail.app's Tiger version removed the "Subject or Sender" search. Now you have to choose which you want. That's simply not efficient. Thunderbird's is nice. But their full text search isn't fast. Integration with Spotlight would be good, but the support for doing that in Thunderbird is buggy, apparently.

5) Nice drag and drop UI - this makes it easier for me to drag missed spam into the right folders (they are categorised into "regular spam", "foreign" and "nigerian", so having to type these folder names every time (a-la pine) is a pain.

6) Support for a mixed proxy environment. I have two accounts, one requires a SOCKS5 proxy (that can go up and down all the time) the other doesn't require a proxy.

If I were asked to speak at google I'd ask for this too:

From: http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/2008/05/16/google/

Nothing much. Just a few lines of code. No speaker's fee. :-)

Someone asked on IRC today what's a nice simple module to use for config files. Someone suggest YAML. Jeez, talk about not simple. And YAML is actually hard to write by hand. Someone else suggested XML with XML::Simple. Same thing - a large complex module and the config format isn't particularly user editable. No disrespect meant to those who suggested those things - I just think differently...

All you usually need is INI files. Here's a simple parser I often use:

sub parse_config {
    my ($self, $file) = @_;
    open(my $fh, $file) || die "open($file): $!";
    my @lines = <$fh>;
    close $fh;
    chomp(@lines);
    my $config = $self->{config} = {};
    my $section;
    for (@lines) {
        s/^\s*//;
        s/\s*$//;
        next unless /\S/;
        next if /^#/;
        if (/^ \[ (.*) \] $/x) {
            $section = $config->{uc$1} = {};
        }
        elsif (/^ (\w+) \s* = \s* (.*) $/x) {
            die "key=value pair outside of a section" unless $section;
            $section->{lc$1} = $2;
        }
        else {
            die "invalid line in $file: $_";
        }
    }
}

It's nice and simple, requires no external modules or CPAN downloads, and works pretty well for most situations where simple config files are needed.

For a test. Please ignore. mark@advancedambient.com.

So I've been playing with IMAP lately, processing a folder of emails to process. It has been kind of interesting (to say the least).

Those of you who follow my CPAN uploads know I created Net::IMAP::Simple::NB, which is a subclass of Net::IMAP::Simple but using non-blocking I/O. The idea for that originally was to create a webmail system for AxKit2, but it was also fun learning how IMAP works.

There are some really interesting corner issues in IMAP that surprise me. For example an IMAP server is expected to be able to parse MIME messages, and be able to provide different components of the body as requested. This seems odd to me as frankly this should be a client task - surely this slows IMAP servers down? Also when you ask for the body structure it maps it in a very odd manner - though perhaps its useful for clients - there seems to be a lot of structure data there that isn't useful. There are some other odd choices too, like dates are provided as "DD-MON-YYYY" rather than the more ISO compliant "YYYY-MM-DD" format, and email addresses are provided pre-parsed, which means if your IMAP server gets it wrong you're screwed (though I guess that isn't too common).

On the other hand there are some nice things too, like IMAP provides most of its data in an S-expressions-like format, which is quite easy to parse in perl. The RFC is also not as horrible as I had once thought, so decoding various things is reasonably easy. On the other hand, it seems Net::IMAP::Simple is a bit too simplistic, in that it doesn't parse the output formats properly, and honestly doesn't have enough methods in it (I've added 8 methods just for my one simple app).

I'll have to consider contacting the author about patches. Though I'm unsure right now if I want to have too much to do with it in the long term.

Some of you may know that Time::Piece became part of perl 5.10. Anyone one of the things discovered was that I accidentally dropped a BSD copyright off one of the XS functions. This is now added back in. I also added an add_months() and add_years() set of functions, to make date arithmetic a bit easier.

This was interesting seeing what happens with the edge-case dates. It seems that when you do 31st March + 1 month you end up with 1st May. This mirrors what other date libraries appear to do. I documented the gotcha.

Enjoy.

Image

        A small creek frozen over that I found on the drive home yesterday. The
        utter silence while taking this photograph was perfect, broken by the
        distant screech of an owl.

Original here

Image

        It's deathly cold out there, but I decided yesterday to wrap up warm
        and get my ass out there to do some photography. It was worth it for
        the results, but I sure couldn't hang around long.

Original here