Pushing the envelope

Darren's take on Java, agile methods, cool open source stuff, interesting technologies and other random wanderings through the land of blog.
Updated: 26/01/2003; 11:48:58.
Places to go
Apache Jakarta Project
c2.com
ExtremeProgramming.org
OpenSymphony
XProgramming.com
XP Developer

People to see
Russell Beattie
Eugene Belyaev
Tony Bowden
Mike Cannon-Brookes
Jeff Duska
Paul Hammant
Scott Johnson
Brett Morgan
Rickard Öberg
James Strachan
Joe Walnes

Things to do

Subscribe to "Pushing the envelope" in Radio UserLand.

Click to see the XML version of this web page.

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


That was the day
October 2002
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
    1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31    
Sep   Nov



Archives
December 2002
November 2002
October 2002
September 2002
August 2002

Listening To


Valid RSS

Click here to visit the Radio UserLand website.

  12 October 2002

Dreams and aspirations

Inspired by ZOË, and motivated partly by the fact that Mutt is still the best go-anywhere remote mail reader, I've been daydreaming about a cross-platform client-server GUI (not web based) java mail program with built in smart indexing and context sensitive threading and dynamic linking.

What have I achieved so far? I've got some very simplistic code that scans an mbox file and creates EmailMessage objects.

On the way I discovered that:

  • There appear to be no open source java libraries for parsing mbox mail files.
  • Mozilla starting work on a java email reader, called Grendel in 1997, but it seems to have died. There appears to be a lot of code in CVS, but most of it seems to be pre-java 1.2, and it requires netscape jars which probably aren't open source.
  • There is apparently no official spec for the mbox format hence...
  • ...the implementation varies significantly between applications and platforms. About the only thing you can assume is that each message starts with 'From ' preceded by a blank line or the start of the file.
  • The 'From ' address at the start of each message isn't necessarily the same as the 'From:' header.
  • Jamie Zawinski (ex-Mozillian) has lots of useful and eclectic information on his site.

9:29:50 PM      comment []

Quality of service

Late night ramblings.... Back to blogging... ahhhh.

I sorta mentioned my new server setup in passing before, but I'm using OrionServer again and I love it. I was thinking about slapping a hacked copy of Weblogic on the server so I can work and play in the same environment, but Orion is just so nice I decided to play nice.

-Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook]

Nice to have you back, Russ.

On Weblogic: Whoa, you've only got 4 gig of disk and a gig of RAM, are you sure she can take it captain?

On JohnCompanies: I received the following at 10 pm PST on a friday night, after signing up at 1pm. Impressed.

Hi,

We have a really nice welcome message that we send out to new customers for our FreeBSD product, but I haven't finished writing the welcome message for our linux customers - I assume you'd rather not wait for that and just get an informal welcome.

...[account stuff skipped]...

P.P.S. We are having a scheduled maintenance tomorrow (saturday) night for about 20 minutes ... this is rare and it is just a coincidence that it is happening the day after you sign up.

A hosting firm that actually keeps their customers informed? Remarkable.

Finally:

...we are very happy to have you as a customer...

I think I'm going to be very happy being one.


9:06:54 AM      comment []

© Copyright 2003 Darren Hobbs