Archive for October, 2002

I’m happy to announce that Hep 0.3 is up for download.

This release of Hep lets you use your favorite e-mail program to post weblog entries.  Supported weblog systems are Blogger, BloggerAPI, MetaWeblogAPI, and Virgule (Advogato-type diaries).  As in previous releases, Hep also fetches messages from RSS feeds and Virgule diaries and converts them to e-mail.

It’s been a few months since my last release of Hep.  In that time I’ve done a lot of work on Hep’s core architecture, most notably converting all the networking stuff to use Twisted.  If you’re interested in getting involved with the development of Hep, now is a good time to do it.  Grab the release, try it out, report bugs.

To make it easier for other people to get involved, I’ve created a project (called hepserver) on SourceForge.  The code is in CVS.  There’s also a mailing list for developers.

A couple of exciting things happened yesterday:

• Wari Wahab sent in the first ever donation towards the development of Hep, in the amount of 5 dollars.  Thanks, Wari!

• Tim O’Reilly wrote that he’s looking for a tool to send e-mail to his blog.

So, feeling motivated, I’m staying up late, finishing the last few items on my to-do list, and getting ready to release Hep 0.3.  And this time I mean it!

Yesterday I did something I’ve been meaning to for almost a year: built a custom 404 handler to help people find pages on this site that have moved.

First I added a line to my .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.py

This tells Apache to use the script "404.py" in the root directory of my site to handle 404 (File Not Found) errors.

Then I uploaded 404.py, a python cgi script.  It contains a dictionary that maps files that have moved to their new locations.  If it can find the page they were looking for in the dictionary, it redirects their browser to the new page location (for an example, try the old Hep page: http://www.fettig.net/projects/000050.html).

If the page isn’t listed in the dictionary, 404.py prints out a "Not found" page (example).

The motivation for me to do this was a look at my web server’s error log, which revealed that I still get hits on /projects.py, my old project page, which has been gone for almost a year.  Now those people will be redirected to my current projects page.  And going forward I won’t have to leave old pages around forever just to avoid broken links.

For those who are interested, the code is here.

Over the past week I’ve had two people come accross this site looking for how to install memory in a Compaq Evo N610c.

Hopefully they found the answer somewhere else, ’cause it wasn’t here. But for Google-using Evo N610c owners of the future, here’s the solution:

Stick your fingernail (or a screwdriver) under the left front panel,

right below the Windows key. Pull up.

Twisted 1.0 has been released.

At some point last week I was working on the message-delivery bits of

Hep. I had finished the part of the SMTP server that accepts incoming

messages, but not part that actually delivers messages to their

destinations. (Since Hep is a multi-protocol message server, those

destinations can include web logs and instant messaging addresses. But

I digress.) For testing, I changed my e-mail client to send all

messages through Hep. When I was done, I shut down the computer and

went to bed.

During the next few days, I wondered why I wasn’t getting any replies to

my e-mails, but didn’t dwell on it.

And of course yesterday, when I went back to working on Hep, there were

all my messages, sitting in my Hep outbox, undelivered. I had forgot to

change my e-mail client’s configuration back, so it was sending all my

mail via Hep, which happily saved them to disk and left them there.

So I apologize to anyone who wrote to me last week and didn’t get a

reply until this morning. I wasn’t trying to be rude, I was using my

own software :-).

Quantum is a plugin that adds support for syntax highlighting SQL files, and running queries against databases through JDBC. I like it better that JFaceDBC – it’s more polished, and gives better feedback when a SQL statement fails. The only problem I’ve had with Quantum so far is that it wants the JDBC driver to be in a single .jar file, and the MS SQL Server driver uses three seperate .jars. But I was able to get around this by unzipping them all and then zipping them together.

Solex is a very cool plugin for testing and debugging web applications. It has a built-in HTTP proxy, so you can run your browser through it while you access a web site, and it will record all your actions as an script that you can edit or play back later. I haven’t had a need to use it yet, but it looks like it will be very handy next time I have to test a web app.

The more I use Eclipse, the more I like it. And I can’t believe how many useful plugins are already out there. Thanks to all the developers working on this thing!

I usually don’t think of myself as an IDE person, but since I downloaded it yesterday I’ve been extremely impressed with Eclipse. It looks just like part of my Gnome 2 desktop, it works very well with CVS out of the box, and there’s a lot of people working on it (outside of the core developers at IBM), writing plugins to support various languages and version control systems. (Most of these projects seem to be hosted on SourceForge – do a search for “Eclipse Plugin” and see what you get).

Screen shot of Eclipse, working on Hep

I found two different Python plugins in development, neither of which does more than provide syntax highlighting at the moment. That’s OK with me, though, since Eclipse lets you set up external programs (like /usr/bin/python) which you can run against the current file and see the output from (with error messages highlighted in red). I also installed a C# plugin, which worked fine for writing a “Hello World” program using Mono, and a couple other plugins for XSL and Ruby.

But the really exciting thing is this: You can use the JFaceDbc plugin, combined with the Microsoft JDBC driver for SQL Server, to run SQL statements against SQL Server from Linux, with a nice modern looking GUI (screenshot). This is something I’ve been looking for for a long time, since we use SQL Server where I work.

As IDE’s go, Eclipse isn’t too intrusive, either. It’s still a bit too slow loading and to use for simple file-editing jobs, and the single-window-with-lots-of-stuff-in-it UI definitely doesn’t feel “unixy”. But when you’re spending large amounts of time working on a set of source files it works really well. And it doesn’t require you to make modifications to your existing projects. It creates a single hidden XML file called .project in the top level directory, but other than that your code is left as-is.

I have to stop making statements about when the next release of Hep will come out. It’s embarrassing to go back later and see how far off I was. So I won’t make any such predictions here. But I will give a status update:

• I’ve created a sourceforge project for Hep, but I haven’t had time to upload the code or set up CVS or mailing lists yet. I’ll probably do those things at the same time I release Hep 0.3.

• The backend stuff is all working again. I’ve been using the development version of Hep all this week without any crashes or odd behavior.

• The user interface isn’t done yet, though. Currently there isn’t any way to configure any of the new features I’ve added since the last release. So that’s what I’m working on now.

This week the company where I work gave me a new laptop to use, a Compaq Evo n610c. I’m using it to type this. My personal laptop is a 500MHz Celeron. This one is a 2GHz P4 (with 512M of memory), and it’s very nice. As I type this, it’s running Mozilla, Evolution, Gaim, and Rhythmbox in Linux, while the same time installing ActiveState Perl in Windows 2000, running under VMWare (screenshot).

And it’s humming along. Amazing.

I’d like to write a page of tips for installing Linux on the Evo 610c (there are a few issues I’ve run into so far), but it’s not at the top of my to-do list.