fettig.net

I released Hep 0.2.2 today. Hopefully this release fixes the ‘The socket operation could not complete without blocking’ errors people were getting when running Hep on windows.

Here’s a secret: I don’t know a lot about network programming. I’d never worked with network sockets before I started Hep. Now I’m writing web and e-mail servers from scratch, figuring it out as I go. That’s how programming is. You get an idea of what you want a program to do, and then you set out to make it happen. Along the way you learn about the inner workings of things you never even thought about before. Writing software is a mix of inventing and exploring, which are both fun things to do. That’s why I like it.

Nigel L sent me his notes on running Hep on Windows ME, with Mozilla as a mail client. In short, it works, but the documentation had some errors, and he’d rather not have to use the command line to add users. Thanks Nigel. To fix the documentation issues I’ve released Hep 0.2.1, download or read the documentation online. A future version of Hep will give you the ability to add users through the web interface, and create a default user for you during the install.

There’s a new version of Hep (now officially called Hep Messaging Server) available for download. The GUI from version 0.1 is gone, replaced by web and POP3 servers that let you configure Hep through your browser, and get messages through your e-mail client.

Sending messages to weblogs still isn’t supported, but it will be in the next couple of weeks. So Hep 0.2 doesn’t really do anything more than 0.1 did – it works as a news aggregator, and that’s about it. But internally it has a lot of new features – built in POP3 and web servers, support for multiple users, and a cleaned up API, which gives me a good platform to build on.

Now that it doesn’t have its own client interface, Hep should run on any operating system that supports Python and the Python standard libraries. I’ve been developing it on Linux, but this morning I tested it on Windows and it ran, without errors, the first try. Hooray for Python!

I’m going to be offline this weekend, and busy moving into a new apartment, so I won’t be answering e-mail until Monday. Have a good weekend!

Mark Interrante sends a pointer to Interwingle,

one of the ideas floating around in the Mozilla project. Some interesting thoughts on the way e-mail messages relate to each other, and how that could be used in searching. I won’t be adding features like searching and filtering to Hep any time soon – people who want to search and filter messages can do so with their mail client. But at some point it might make sense to move these things into the server.

The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) “is developing software tools and knowledge based documentation that helps people secure web applications and web services.” They’ve got a free

book (Read before you click: PDF, 93 pages, 1.7 megs) available on their website.

The transition from a client

application to a messaging server is easier than I thought it

would be, mostly thanks to Python’s excellent asyncore/asynchat

modules, which make writing servers for text-based protocols

surprisingly simple. (As an example, the new POP3 interface

to Hep is a little more than 200 lines of code).

Now I’m working on a built-in web server (again, not as hard as

it sounds) so that Hep can provide it’s own web interface for

configuration. Generally I prefer native applications to web

interfaces, but in this case a web interface seems like the

easiest way to go since Hep will be running on different platforms.

I also decided to bite the bullet and make Hep a multi-user

system. This is mostly so more than one person can user Hep

on the same box without fighting over ports. This means that

the first few version will probably be rediculously insecure.

On the plus side, it’s another good thing I’ll be learning from

this project. I spend some time at the book store last week

trying to find a book along the lines of “Designing Reasonably

Secure Server Software”, but such a thing doesn’t seem to exist.

Any suggestions?

I’ve released a new Hep tarball that fixes a bugs in the 0.1 version, where messages with long Subject lines and/or IDs would get corrupted.

The new also version stores it’s messages in maildir directories, which is

faster and much less prone to corruption. Also, it uses a slightly

different format for the ID numbers it generates for RSS newsfeeds.

This means that, if you’re currently using Hep 0.1, you’ll lose whatever messages are currently in your

Inbox, and the first time you run this version it will re-download

messages that you’ve already read and deleted. All your accounts will be intact, though.

Thanks to everyone who’s given me feedback on Hep over the past two days!

This morning I got an e-mail from Gary Benson, with a terrific idea, one that makes all my ideas for Hep fall into place: make Hep run as an email server, handling all the backend stuff while letting people use whatever mail client they like.

Implementing this won’t be hard, it will make Hep easier to maintain and it will make it instantly work in Windows and OS X. The only platform-specific bit will be the GUI configurator.

Here’s how it will work: You write your mail message and send it to the Hep server. Hep looks through the To: list, and pulls out any addresses for non-email accounts (for example, “myweblog@hep”). Then it delivers those messages to whever they’re supposed to go. If there are regular e-mail addresses in the list, Hep will forward them to a real SMTP server.

Hep will retrieve messages from various places on the Internet, just like it does now, and make them available through POP, so you can get them with your mail client. It will support viewing, editing, and deleting messages from weblogs and advogato diaries via IMAP.

I should have a new release of Hep ready by next week.

I’m happy to present my new project: Hep. Hep is my attempt at building a multi-protocol internet client that thinks the way I do. Currently, it’s not much more than a news aggregator, fetching messages and bits of news from various places on the internet and displaying them to you. By the time it’s done it should be much more – a tool for viewing, editing, and transferring information in and through many different systems.

If that sounds vague, here are some examples:

• You could post a message to your weblog and CC your Advogato diary, a co-worker (through e-mail) and a friend (through instant messaging)
• You could sort, filter, and archive RSS headlines just like you do e-mail
• You could set up a filter that sends you a text message whenever you get an e-mail from your spouse
• You could create a “Banana News” weblog that gets automatically updated any time one of the websites you read posts an article about bananas.

And hopefully you’ll think of wonderful new things to do with Hep, things that I haven’t thought of yet.

Right now Hep is in the early stages of development. It runs without crashing, but it doesn’t do very much. If you’re feeling curious, you can try it out.