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the avatar of James Willcox
the avatar of James Willcox
the avatar of James Willcox

iTunes 7

iTunes 7 was announced today, which means more ipod-sharp breakage. It doesn’t look like anything really changed except the database version, so I’ve bumped that and released 0.6.1. The music sharing stuff in iTunes hasn’t changed for ages, so Tangerine still works fine.

the avatar of James Willcox
the avatar of James Willcox

YUMier Than Bacardi

When I was in Boston last week, my cohorts and I whipped up something wonderful: a rug interface for yum. We call it ‘rum’, and it has nearly all the features of the original (used with rcd) rug. “zOMG!!! WHY?!!11”, you ask? Well, after using and working on rug/rcd/zmd for the past 3 or 4 years, we simply can’t use anything else. It’s a sickness. So what’s in it for you, the average yum user?


  • The world-renowned, award-winning, ‘search’ command

  • “tilde” support (rum in foo bar ~baz), which allows you to add and remove packages at the same time

  • Easily add/remove/enable/disable repositories. Never edit a config file again!

  • Persistent package locks (known as ‘excludes’ in the yum world)

  • New commands are easily added. Just drop a python file in the appropriate place, and it is automatically added to the rum interface.

You can download RPMs for FC5-i386, FC6-i386, and SuSE 10.x-i586. For you adventurous build-from-source types, a tarball is here. Enjoy!

the avatar of James Willcox

the avatar of James Willcox
the avatar of James Willcox

muthafuckin' tangerines on a muthafuckin' plane^Wwindows

This weekend I spent some more time making Tangerine work on Windows. I built Bonjour from scratch so I could distribute the binaries, and polished up the Tangerine installer as well. I gave it a good deal of testing, but there might be something I missed still. The Windows version includes a plugin for finding songs automatically through Google Desktop.



The preferences window for Tangerine (under Windows)


Download Now!

Update: I just put up a new version which fixes a bunch of issues I found. It also adds the missing features to the config window and hopefully makes it look a little nicer. Updated screenshot above.

Update 2: Another updated version up with more bug fixes. I don’t have a bug tracker set up, but if you guys hit any problems just email me (snorp@snorp.net).

a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

Blogging-Tool and activities in the meantime

Anyone with a good suggestion for a _usable_ blogging tool that also allows adding pictures without clicking hundreds of buttons for each?

This and the fact that some features of the crappy web frontend of Blogger did not work at all were the reasons I did not post recently and why I will make all this here less frequent and shorter.

In the meantime I had a meeting with a black bear in the wilderness. It seems the bear was at least as surprised meeting me there as I was meeting him. Thus we both just looked at each other and after some time of mutual inspection we just continued our way.

Yesterday I was hiking this mountain.

a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

Evolution Exchange Performance Series - Chapter 1 - Folder Loading

One of the critical issues in exchange mailer is - time spent to load the hierarchy or mail folders. See this graph: Exchange mailer folder loading graph

It clearly shows most of time is spent in constructing folder objects. The sample size used to generate this graph is two folders with 210 and 50 mails repectively. Patch extends Federico's sample code and implements different levels of checkpoints. Graph on the left hand side is generated using a E2K_LOG_LEVEL=1.

As I mentioned in my previous blog, this is the customized plot-timeline script that generated this image.

a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

Mail System Failure

Due to a system failure of a central mail processing machine I currently don't have regular access to all mails sent to me via mailing lists or that were sent to me at 2006-08-10 from about 00:00 GMT to 04:11 GMT. All mails sent to my mail address after 04:11 GMT were handled correctly by an automatic service recovery system. A data recovery process will try to recover the data at 2006-08-11 03:45 GMT. If this fails I will read your mail not before 2006-08-21.

Thus if you have sent me an important mail just within the critical four hours please send it again.

a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

Evolution Exchange Connector

A new feather got added to my cap of responsibilities w.r.t evolution, viz., Exchange connector - one of the distinguishing features of mighty Evolution. My responsibilities for Exchange connector ranges from fixing some critical customer issues to performance, scalability and stability of the module. One of the key problems with exchange module is performance. Initial loading of folders takes huge amount of time as compared to IMAP/POP/GW. After reading through quite a lot of tutorials and blogs, I came across Federico's blog about how strace can be helpfull for profiling with minimum coding.

Took the sample code from Federico's blog and extended it a little bit to have different levels to avoid too many messages and included thread-ids to group the messages. I have also customized the plot-timeline script to group by thread-id. Will upload the patch and the graph, generated by the script, later.