More bug-fixing for the 0.7

About 25 bugs were fixed over the last week and among them is the “0.7 cannot read calendars from 0.4″.  The next release of Spicebird - the 0.7 is round the corner.  About the release schedule, it’s a few blockers and a little testing thats needed, which could take upto 10 days.

We are also working on getting the addons site up and port the most-used thunderbird and calendar addons to Spicebird.  We already have Enigmail, Nostalgy, Minimize to Tray and GMailUI and are working to have many more for Spicebird Beta 0.7!

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My new Firefox Bike

Today I bought a new bike hoping to use it for a few kilometers every day - fifteen to start with.  These few kilometer I hope would give me some physical excercise, save a little on my everyday carbon emissions and ofcourse save a little money for me - the fuel is pretty expensive these days :)

Yes, I bought a Firefox Target and apart from the good reviews and the color combination, I like the brand!  Its too early for me to review it, but I would soon do it.  The first thing I did after purchasing it is to ride to office for a photo.

It cost me about 11,000 INR which is less than my two months spend on gas, but is pretty expensive considering how a bike is precieved in India.

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Empathy shipping with Gnome 2.24

http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.24/

Empathy is a Telepathy framework based instant messaging client and its inclusion into GNOME 2.24 means that Telepathy and related libraries will be available on most linux distributions by default.  That will make the life of Spicebird easier in the linux world :)

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Bug Fixing and Calendar make-over

Last week we had exciting time fixing many bugs on Spicebird - some of them crashers, Sunil committing his work on blogging and the new calendar-theme.

Starting with the 14th of September, the nightly builds have been randomly crashing on windows which a lot of users reported.  The fixes were committed on Thursday and made their way to the Friday’s nightly builds.  Apart from this few other smaller bugs were fixed through last week.

The calendar had a pending theme update, which was meant to make it more desktop friendly ofcourse not compromising on the visual aspects of it - more updates to the calendar usability are waiting!

Calendar under a dark desktop theme

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Cleaner date formats

Today Ashok committed a patch on the Spicebird trunk that adds support for short-date formats in the e-mail listing.  The Mozilla platform does have API and necessary enumerations to request short date formats, but underneath the implementation was missing and all it returned was the same long date format which looked like “Thursday 12 June 2008 08:51 PM”.

That was what we used in Spicebird earlier.  Now, with the landing of this patch we have many different ways of showing the date

  • Just the time for today’s messages
  • Yesterday and the time for yesterday’s messages
  • Mon…Sat and the time for other messages of this calendar week
  • Day of month and the month for messages in this calendar year
  • Day of month, month and the year for rest of the messages!

The formats are ofcourse localizable and the corresponding upstream bug is #455498.

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Long pending updates on Spicebird Development

The Spicebird team was working behind-the-doors for quiet some time and its probably time to start involving the community more closely and to start posting updates more frequently - one summary update every week apart from the normal feature/development blogs.

Here is the current status of Spicebird and following it are the expected timelines for the 0.7 release.

The main features that were to be included in Spicebird 0.7 are the multi-protocol instant-messaging, the new face of blogging and of-course a lot of smaller look-and-feel and functionality fixes.

We started off expecting to build support for a “few famous” instant-messaging protocols and then we stumbled upon the Telepathy framework which made us rethink the “few famous” part.  Telepathy is a D-Bus based unified framework for many kinds of real-time communications - it allows protocol transparent handling of instant-messaging both textual and multimedia.  As a first step the current trunk of Spicebird already has support for one-to-one chat using the Yahoo, OSCAR, AIM, Jabber, ICQ and MSN protocols!

More details on Telepathy and how it can effect the user is out of the scope of this post, but please bear in mind that code in these parts of the trunk is rapidly changing and is pretty unstable :(

The next one is the new-face of blogging.  The work here is still in progress - keeping minor bugs aside, the system is already working well with Wordpress.

About the timelines of the next Spicebird Beta release, we are expecting to ship the 0.7 release in the second week of October and will follow it up with a quick next release cycle of two months.

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Moving to http://prasad.medhas.org/

As many would already have observed, I am moving my blog from “tux.medhas.org” to “prasad.medhas.org”.  These days more people know me as ‘Prasad’ and hence it makes more sense to have my blog here.

The old URL does redirect here, but please update your bookmarks - specially the links on your websites to make me more famous on the search engines ;)

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Trying to get back to blogging

It’s been more than a year since I blogged here, it’s not becuase I did not have anything to blog about, but it was mostly because I was away biking in the Himalayas, enjoying the beach in Goa, a boat ride in the Papi Kondalu area of Godavari river, attending the Mozilla Summit or very busy with Spicebird!

Earlier this year we went on a trip to Papi Kondalu, a group of hills along river Godavari.  I would recommend the trip for anyone in Andhra Pradesh who is looking for a short holiday close to the nature.  Ofcourse there are other places too like the Araku Valley or find a friend’s home in the greenery of the coasts of Godavari, Krishna or Guntur districts :)

In early May, it was time for a trip to Goa where a couple were renewing their marriage vows, this was only the second Christian ceremony I attended, but they do look interesting for the simplicity with which the entire ceremony is organized.  We did go around Goa for a couple of days.

July was the time for a Biking trip in the Himalayas… after half-a-year of planning we finally made to Manali, which was the starting point for what would be a memorable biking tour through few of the world’s highest roads to Leh.  The trip lasted for a 10 days (Hyderabad to Hyderabad).  From Leh, we later took a cab to the world’s highest motorable road.  In my attempts to spend holidays close to nature, this is my second trip to Himalayas and is definitely more memorable than the first.  For all those residents of India, 10 days and some money is all it takes - don’t miss it.  For people who don’t reside here, India is a place of diversity and am sure it is difficult to cover all of it in one trip - so there might be other things that you like better here.  Will try to make a dedicated post for it ;)

End of July came the Mozilla Summit at the amazing Whistler, BC, Canada.  It was an oppurtunity to meet many Mozilla developers whom I knew only by their IRC handles or the e-mail addresses.  Attended a lot of sessions there, mostly those that are relevant to mailnews, many of the Mozilla Labs sessions and the India specific stuff.  As a representative of Spicebird, I hope there will be a lot more cooperation with the Thunderbird and Lightning developers.  The evil forces did try hard to disrupt the summit, but could not match the force.  Thanks for the great conference guys.

And then it’s the Spicebird during the rest of the time.  We released Spicebird 0.4 Beta in January and got loads of constructive feedback from the community - lot of it has already gone in to the nightly builds that we make, and a lot more lying still under development.  More about Spicebird to come in further posts - a short thing I will want to say is that 0.7 is in development and all the developers are working hard to get it out as quickly as possible.  I will post a more detailed update about 0.7 soon.

Well, that was a long post and expect shorter more frequent updates in future.  Keep visiting ;)

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Aug 17

I was born on August 17th, 1980 and was browsing to see what else happened on Aug 17th.  Here are a few things that matter to a lot of people.

  • The first Compact Discs were released to the public in Germany in 1982. 200 Billion CDs were sold since then!
  • Gabon gained Independence from France in 1960
  • Indonesia declared independent in 1945
  • MD5 Collision was found by Chinese researchers in 2004

If you know of more, post it in comments :)

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Standards: Will India ever wake up?

ConsortiumInfo.org - Norwegian Standards Council Recommends Mandatory use of ODF and PDF

Norway is the latest European country to move closer to mandatory government use of ODF (and PDF). According to a press release provided in translation to me by an authoritative source, Norway now joins Belgium, Finland, and France (among other nations) in moving towards a final decision to require such use.

I was browsing one of the many government portals - The Ministry of Company Affairs. Though the portal is a great idea for the companies in India, don’t the developers of such important portals realize that the Internet Explorer is not the only browser on the Internet and that Microsoft is not the only producer of software?

Well, I did contact the webmaster through the contact form on the website and got a reply which said that a portal that works on Internet Explorer was part of the requirements and that the developers have met the requirements as laid out by the government!  Will the government ever wake up and move itself to standards?  Thankfully, though not mandated by the government, the reports and a few other downloads seem to be PDFs.

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