Yesterday was a good software day. I upgraded to my weblogging software to nanoblogger 3.3RC4, and my email client from mutt to mutt-ng.
mutt-ng I have some very large mailboxes. My spam folder has almost 200,000 messages. For a long time I haven't dared open the spam folder with mutt. It just takes too long. I stopped reading many mailing lists because the mailboxes got too large. mutt-ng takes care of that. It adds header caching. The first time mutt-ng opens a folder it may be slow, but the next time it is really fast. My spam folder now opens in 40 seconds instead of 5 minutes. The other nice feature of mutt-ng is the sidebar. The sidebar shows all your mailboxes, and if there is new mail in them or not. I configured mutt-ng to use vi style keys for navigating the mailbox. Bad. mutt-ng has not fixed the problem of binding special keys inside macros. In fact, binding special keys even outside of macros is touch and go. Special keys are keys that you can't type in directly so you have to type in their symbolic name, surrounded by angle brackets. Here are some examples: <space> <enter> <pageup>
Tobacco. After dealing with mutt-ng it was lunchtime; John and I sat in his shaded veranda and puffed away on some fine cigars from a country currently at war with the USA. They say to walk a mile in someones shoes to understand them. After puffing on the second cigar in my whole life, I still don't know what people see in it. Maybe it looks cool, and tobacco does have a subtle taste, but the smoke tends to get up the nose, and then it really hurts, like smelling bleach. The taste of tobacco tends to bite the tongue, like swallowing a wasp, or sticking your tongue across the terminals of an electric battery. If cocaine is acid and eats away your insides, what about tobacco?
nanoblogger. nanoblogger was designed in the true Unix spirit; it is one tool that does things well. It leverages existing software to the maximum. nanoblogger is a giant shell script that interprets templates. The template language is the shell script language itself. nanoblogger allows you to include output from plugins written in any language. Pretty impressive for a shell script. Good. I upgraded because until version 3.3 nanoblogger was missing an important feature that was in my original diary software. That feature is the forward and previous links, so you can always check out the next and last blog posts from the one you are reading. As advertised, the feature works. Bad. The CSS (cascading style sheets) were changed, so the entire look of my blog changed. I had to spend a couple hours with an editor figuring out what had changed in the stylesheets to make my blog look like it used to. Another gotcha to watch out for is that the mime style message separator at the bottom of each raw post (found in the data/ directory) has changed. If you don't go through each blog post from your old blog and modify it, you will get an ugly series of dashes at the end of each post. The old mime separator was "-----", 5 dashes. Now it is "END-----", the word END and 5 dashes. Simple change, easy to fix with vim's macro facility.