Musings

R. stumbled upon Jeftel that promises (among other things) an end to Spam. They do it by using a proprietary, peer-2-peer email system. That’s great news actually, beacuse it shows us, that we haven’t been the only ones having this idea. (And as Simon Garfinkel notes, P2P comes clean and can be used for other purposes than sharing music). So how does it compare to what we at ZAPPATA are doing. I have outlined how ZAPPATA solves email problems (not just Spam). And we don’t do anything proprietary either: We use known and trusted protocols: SMTP, POP3, IMAP, DNS. ...

I returned from a long weekend (or rather, a very short vaccation) from the south of France, left the family behind to do some more vaccationing and resumed the task of earning money (as every caring family father should do). It was difficult at best to get back. We had a wonderful lunch in La table d’Emilie (13 points Gault Millaut) and even the kids got their share of Foie Gras and other good stuff. They managed to sit through almost 2 hours of lunch and really enjoyed the food (well, most of it). Highly recommended (and for Euro 90 for the four of us with complete menus each, not expensive at all) ...

That’s a bit of a pain (because Java is not free software), but Martin Fowler has a method for installing Java on a Debian system

We have released a new build of ZAPPATA today. You can grab it from the Download page. We spent a lot of time polishing the IMAP server and it should behave nicer with a wider variety of clients. The IMAP RFC 3501 is not exactly lightweight, and the protocol is very powerful and very chatty. There are a lot of things that can go wrong in IMAP transactions between email clients and servers. It’s been interesting to see how different clients talk to the server. Each client I have observed (Outlook & Outlook Express, Opera, Thunderbird, The Bat!, Mulberry) handle the task in a different way. Demanding. ...

I needed the Notes Agent FAQ at a clients site, and had to hunt for it… Now, I have it at my fingertips ;-)

Joi links to a video from a massacre on people in Falluja. This is not only disturbing. It’s sickening and makes me want to puke. This is NOT the way to create peace. It’s an atrocity in an illegal war.