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Snow Crash
I've been involved in the world that is Snow Crash again the last few days. I love reading and I forget how involved I get in fiction. I am very intrigued by the ideas presented, not only by the Metaverse but also by the ideas and mythology presented about language. I'm sure I could read this book many many times
Informant
I didn't get anything done on Informant today. Since Monday will be busy with class and trying to finish my last project for my Physics class, I don't think I will reach my goal of a December 1 release. I will be ready for a release soon, as I feel I have done enough to warrant one. To date, I have:
- Moved Informant to sit in the notification area
- Refactored it to separate the "informers" and the "listeners" I only have one of each at the moment, but before the release I will make an e-mail informer and an informer proxy. The proxy will be so I can have notifications displayed on multiple machines.
- Made the sources attempt to connect with a delay in between until a successful connect
- Added regular expression search support to the email source
- Added the ability to search the body of email in the email source
What's left to do? I think I know pretty much what code I need to write for all of this:
- Add command line parameters to the sources to specific non-default parameters for host and port to connect to
- Factor out the configuration stuff used in the sources to remove code duplication
- Move all configuration files under the ~/.informant directory
- Factor out the commonality in filter sources (like the email and log file source).
- Listen on a Unix socket by default, but allow for easy listening on TCP for cross-machine communication
- Use standard Gnome icons in the notification area instead of the ugly custom ones I made (Maybe)
All of that should take a couple of hours and then update of the documentation. Maybe I'll have that done on Tuesday.
I think I'll target another release for at the very latest Christmas. If I get a lot more done, I'll shoot for December 15. Probably not because the coming week is going to busy with end of the semester stuff and then the following week is preparation for my final. Targets for my next release:
- Actually get the RSS source to work. Probably means just using the internals of TouRSSt myself unless Tv fixes the bug I reported.
- Fix up the alerts window. Add support for clearing only specific items. Get help to make this HIG compliant
- Add support for display and use of alert priority
- Improved log file / irc watcher source
That's all I can think of for now. Probably a lot more time will be spent on the Alerts Window. I really want to get it solid and the rest of the code working cleanly so I can focus on improving the sources, making them easier to use, making them easier to write, and making them more powerful. They are, after all, the reason I started writing Informant.
