A woman was recently suspended from her job at British Airways because she wore a tiny cross, “smaller than a ten pence peace.” Astounded, she said that, “I will not hide my belief in the Lord Jesus Christ. British Airways permits Muslims to wear a headscarf…Only Christians are forbidden to express their faith.”^[1]

The title of this article says it all: “Liver cells grown from cord blood.”^[1] While this will not yield organs for liver transplants yet, this will significantly aid drug development and testing, avoiding at least some of the need for human and animal testing. Without any of the moral problems of embryonic stem cells, this represents yet another example of the false and misleading way in which the debate is being presented in this country. We are not banning stem cell research. We are preventing people from being used, killed, as research material.

Mr. Stefano Zacchiroli’s thoughts^[1] on Mutt and gaim’s evolution integration have motivated me to write a little on each.

I like mutt. I really do. Ever since Mr. Ethan Blanton introduced me to it, it has served me well. Recently though I started using Mail.app, the OSX mail client, for my personal mail. I made this change in part to be able to decrease my reliance on gmail and similar for the odd html formatted mail that I want to read, in part for the ease of setup, and in part because the thought of setting up a mail server to send mail from on my laptop is daunting. I do not trust darwinports to get things right and work consistently all that much, nor do I wish to compile and maintain postfix myself. This is after all why I use debian on my other machines: to be able to ignore the software that I do not want to actively track and know the details of myself.

But I find myself on OSX for my laptop. I want to use Quicken, and I want to be able to run the Rosetta language software, even though I do not in fact do so nearly enough to actually make noticeable progress. It also does not hurt that Civilization, about the only computer game I’ve remained significantly attracted to since graduating, runs on OSX. So I find myself leaving mutt some.

Having done so, I can see some other gains. I have address book integration, which is nice. So I can, in a theoretical sense, see that if integration between a real address book and an email address book is nice, it might be nice to add in the IM contact list into the mix. After all, most of the people on the buddy list for my personal accounts are also in my address book.

Which brings me to gevolution. I have disliked evolution every time I have touched it. It is big, consuming more memory than I like. It is fragile, crashing more than I am willing to put up with in a mail client. Mail.app’s handling of threading is poor, evolution’s handing is (or at least was) worse. Additionally, it pushes me more towards GNOME, and I really do not like the GNOME Desktop Environment.

I appear to not be particularly alone in this dislike of evolution. As a result, the gevolution plugin, originally written by Mr. Christian (ChipX86) Hammond, is rather neglected. Mr. Hammond left the project with gevolution in a rather unfinished state, which should not be taken as a detraction from him: most of gaim was then and is still in an unfinished state. That does not hide the reality though that gevolution, like the rest of gaim, needs a significant amount of Tender Loving Care, but unlike the rest of gaim, is not significantly likely to get any.

It is very nearly abandoned code. As such, it is becoming increasingly fragile, and its flaws are going largely unfixed. When I see this sort of code, my reaction is that we should drop it. Yes, some users like it, but it is causing problems that we do not intend to invest time fixing. If someone really likes it, they can of course check out an old version of gaim, rip that code out, and make it compile as a 3rd party plugin.

This temptation grows with every bug report I see that ends up being traced to the gevolution plugin. Bugs about not being able to add or remove buddies, or about slowness, or inexplicable crashes. What is the solution here? I am not sure.

Abortion proponents have long argued that a right to abortion should be guaranteed by international law because restricting abortion leads to high maternal mortality. However, UN reports such as the 1991 World Health Organization (WHO) report “Maternal Mortality, A Global Factbook,” conclude that decreased maternal mortality rates in the developed world, “coincided with the development of obstetric techniques and improvements in the general health status of women.” Subsequent WHO reports have identified low social and economic status, unskilled birthing attendants, and poor nutrition as underlying causes of maternal mortality. They also identify anemia and malaria as primary indirect causes of maternal deaths in Africa.^[1]

The idea that banning abortions will cost lives is a pernicious rumor. It is good to see some real data on the subject.

As I get used to trac, I am slowly coming to like it. It is not so horrid as SF is. Hopefully we can work out the remaining issues!

The thermostat for this office is downstairs. It is set to 65. I want to talk to Eric before I raise it much more, I do not want to be needlessly expensive. But I am really tempted to raise it, not because I am particularly cold at 65, but because it is only 60 up here right now. How is that possible?

We finally have a server to host the project!! Donated and hosted by dvlabs.com, this is a huge step forward for us as a project. I am slowly configuring it, getting apache2, subversion, planet, mysql, and such up and running. It is a slow process, but fortunately we are not pressed for time yet.

Today is St. Luke’s feast day. I should re-read Dear and Glorious Physician. Fortunately Mom owns a copy. I remember the effort that took to get her one, as it was already out of print then.

Today in the gaim forum^[1], a user proposed forking gaim because of the slowness and selfishness with which we proceed.^[2] If it happens it will not be the first such fork, but rather the third or forth such. The only unique thing about it will be that will be libgaim based.

I have always a little bit contemptuous of true forks, because they have consistently been started by users who clearly have no clue how much work we put into gaim. Precisely because they were unprepared for that level of effort, these forks have quickly failed.

A libgaim based “fork” would be a different matter entirely. It would not, in fact, be a true fork at all, and to call it one is to utterly mistake why we worked so hard to split gaim into a UI and a library, into “gaim” and “libgaim.”

We want there to exist other interfaces. You want an interface that integrates with GNOME to a significant degree? GREAT! Grab libgaim, and even grab our existing Gtk UI if you like any aspect of it, and write one. You want an interface built to fit in with KDE? Awesome, grab libgaim, break out your QT API reference, and get busy. OSX? I personally think Adiumx does a reasonable job, for all I have a few differences of opinion with them, but hey, if you do not want to help them with their libgaim based efforts, write a second (or third, considering Proteus) one. Dissatisfied with wingaim? I sincerely hope that someone will write a better UI for windows users than we provide.

The point here is that we have what is (in my opinion) one of the best back-end code bases available, with better (though far from perfect) protocol support than most other projects have been able to generate. Why should that effort be duplicated? It represents 2/3rds of the necessary code to run a successful IM client project. That is a ton of effort essentially being wasted when we duplicate it over and over again. Effort that we believe could be better used to make more things work for more users.

But while it is clear that supporting the varied protocols requires a huge chunk of very similar code, it is far from clear that it is possible for any one interface to fully please all users. I go so far as to argue, consistently, that it is in fact impossible for any given interface to be the best for everyone.

The only reasonable way to approach this then is to enable people to write interfaces that meet their needs while avoiding the duplication of effort that starting from scratch entails. This requires libgaim, or at least some equivalent. We here in gaim could never support the N interfaces that we foresee, or at least hope to see, eventually existing. But now we will not need to. The source is there for your use, grab it, and lets see what you can do with it, what sort of interface you design. I wish you the best of luck!

and learn I go in again on the 2nd.