recreation day

Photo from Evergrey-concert, yesterday 20.03. Excellent music from the Swedish rockers; I've known them for years, but this was the first time I saw them live. Great concert, very talented band, and they were nice enough to do an autograph session afterwards; I even got into a picture with the guys -- slightly embarrassing...

Time for an update... Our beloved modest e-mail client is humming along happily. We're putting a lot of energy of testing all kinds of use cases, as well as weird error conditions. Modest/tinymail contain quite some code (in total around 240K lines), so there are a lot of things to test. Anyway, I was already quite happy with our first bèta release, back in December. And modest has seen solid and consistent improvement since, every single week (with a few regressions thrown in to keep things interesting...).

Also, I have been quite happy with my emacs-on-N810. It has turned my N810 is a versatile PDA. I'm slowly capturing the power of org-mode in Emacs (see the 25 minute video), which is an amazing way to handle todo-lists, GTD and so on.

Then, there is so much happening in free software land, it's hard to keep track of it, even if just looking at the level of fundamental tools. Some things that I found quite interesting:

• Dehydra/GCC is a plugin for gcc (Javascript!) built within the context of the Mozilla project. Mozilla uses an object system called XPCOM, which is 'inspired' by Microsoft's COM. However, times have changed, and in many place in the huge Mozilla codebase, this XPCom is seen unnecessary bloat and complexity. For example, in COM-style, one uses the return value of a method for error checking; the 'real' return value comes as an outparam. However, in many cases (see DeCOMtamination), it's much better to use a normal return value, and use e.g. exceptions for error handling. Now, try to do that automatically, taking into account possibly misuse of outparams -- sometimes, sed/awk/perl are just not enough. And that is where DeHydra comes in.
  
• gold, the new & improved GNU linker. It's good to see that even classic tools like ld are still being improved -- and quite significantly in this case, esp. for speed. What we're still waiting for is link-time optimization, which can significantly speed-up programs, e.g. by making sure the most used functions are in the same memory page.
  
• quagmire (giggedigig!), finally an autotools-replacement projects that seems actually capable of doing so. The initial goals is to replace automake and libtool with a bunch of GNU make macros. By simply requiring GNU make instead of a 'normal' make, a lot of the hackery autotools disappears. Another nice thing is that it understands pkg-config, which simplifies another set of problems. Apparently, the longer term goal is to replace autoconf as well. And, given designer Tom Tromey's track record, the future looks bright.