Copia

Baseball was never for Blacks
It used to be a pastime for Whites
Now it has mad Puerto Ricans
But that's not the point of this song.
The point of this song, and I make it mad simple when I be flipping this script
Is that the industry is all over the mound pitching but nobody's making any hits.
Hmmmmmm.

—Natural Resources—Negro League Baseball

Yeah. Mailbox baseball. That game of legend (I've never seen it played) where a pack of stereotypical American teenage lombards drives down the boulevard whacking at mailboxes with Louisville sluggers from the car windows until they hit one with unclaimed mail, enjoying the resulting shower of fluttering letters. I did something like that to myself today, quite unwittingly. (I'm amazed there's room in my cheek for the tongue after a day like today).

I've been completely retooling my e-mail habits, in part to use uche@ogbuji.net more for professional correspondence that does not have immediate bearing on my day job. I the process I managed to completely kill my fourthought.com address today, and as I hear it, it's all been bouncing to hell. Sorry folks. Unless you work for a company that writes checks to Fourthought, Inc., I'll probably be asking you politely to start using my ogbuji.net address from now on anyway, so you might as well start now (that address wasn't affected by the outage). Meanwhile I've straightened out the config problems, and as soon as DNS has a chance to propagate, my fourthought.com address should be working again.

BTW, those who have ever sent me e-mail at my ogbuji.net account and learned how infrequently I get around to checking it will notice a marked improvement in my attention (I should temper that promise by mentioning that I haven't been able to keep up with even my fourthought.com address in years. It's no fun being afflicted by chronic Scrolliosis).

Back-to-off-topic note w.r.t. my silly intro: If you're an underground hip-hop head and haven't heard the song whose lyrics I used you'd best get up out there and find that single. It's a classic from 1997, and it was the first time I heard the M.C. then known as "What What?" and now recognized as the great Jean Grae (repping South Africa—she runs through your hood with her middle finger up.). It's a great romp of a song that refuses to take itself too seriously, and has the tickly lounge piano in the background loop to match. It's da Jawn!

[Uche Ogbuji]

• Schematron mailing list
• Schematron Wiki

Schematron is the boss XML schema language your boss has never heard of. Unfortunately it's had some slow times of recent, but it's surged back with a vengeance thanks to honcho Rick Jelliffe with logistical support from Betty Harvey. There's now a working mailing list and a Wiki. Rick says that Schematron is slated to become an ISO Standard next month.

The text for the Final Draft Internation Standard for Schematron has now been approved by multi-national voting. It is copyright ISO, but it is basically identical to the draft at www.schematron.com

The standard is 30 pages. 21 are normative, including schema listings and a characterization of Schematron semantics in predicate logic. Appendixes show how to use other query language bindings (than XSLT1), how to use Schematron as a vocabulary, how to express multi-lingual dignostics, and a simple description of the design requirements for ISO Schematron.

Congrats to Rick. Here's to the most important schema language of them all (yes, I do mean that). I guess I'll have to check Scimitar, Amara's fast Schematron processor for compliance to the updated draft standard.

[Uche Ogbuji]

Updated. New details added.

I got fed up with Evolution recently. My main beef with it is that it's all about magic on the back end. All sorts of details, such as what you've deleted or what you've marked as spam are flagged using proprietary metadatabases. The persistence of this information also seems to be dodgy, which means that often, when Evolution crashes it forgets such details, and makes you re-delete, re-file and re-flag things. To make this worse, Evolution crashes a lot, and it seems to especially crash after you've done a lot of message deleting and moving. Over time, Evolution has cost me a lot of tedious work (I get a lot of spam and throwaway mail) and I got to the point where I could no longer stand a tool that increased my workload for little gain.

The main reason I stuck with Evolution for so long is that I have used the MH system to manage my mail for a long time. I like the idea of one message per file. Evolution was the only very modern MUA I could find that supported MH folders. I'd used EXMH for a long time, but it's showing its age, and Sylpheed-claws has way too many rough edges.

So it was time for a change on my Ubuntu workstation, and this is just my notes about what it took to complete the switch of mail management systems.

MH to Maildir

In the end I decided to switch to Maildir, which is like MH in its one-file-per-message philosophy, but seems to be supported by more modern MUAs. I also decided to hedge my bets by moving to a local IMAP server to expose the Maildir folders to just about any MUA.

For the main conversion I used Dr. Jürgen Vollmer's mh2maildir. It did the trick very well. All my MH folders were stored in a directory Mail, and I wanted to have the resulting Maildir in .maildir. I invoked the script as follows:

./bin/mh2maildir.sh -r -R ~/Mail/ ~/.maildir

I knew I had no unread e-mail, thus the -r option. Most users will need the -R option. The original MH diectory is left alone, as far as I can tell, but of course I always recommend backing up your mail folders before any bulk action.

Update. You may need to make some structural adjustments in the resulting .maildir folder. Firstly, many MH tools use an explicit folder named "inbox", which is thus converted into a Maildir folder named "inbox". Most Maildir tools, however, treat the top folder as the implicit inbox. I addressed this as follows:

cd ~/.maildir
mv tmp tmp.save
mv inbox/* .
rm -rf inbox

Also, some Maildir tools such as Mutt and Dovecot expect to see folders as hidden filees (with a leading dot). I handled this by renaming folders, for example:

mv Writing/ .Writing/

If you have nested folders, you have to use a dot to separate levels. A folder "eggs" within "spam" is represented by a top-level directory called ".spam.eggs". I had to do the likes of:

mv XML/XML-DEV .XML.XML-DEV
mv XML .XML

Of course leave alone the "cur", "new" and "tmp" directories which make up the internal structure of each Maildir folder.

Dovecot for IMAP

I went with the Dovecot server for IMAP. I just used Synaptic to install dovecot-common and dovecot-imapd, and followed the article "Setting up an IMAP server with dovecot". The trickiest line in setting up /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf seems to be the default_mail_env.

default_mail_env = maildir:/home/%u/.maildir

Update. I also had to enable imap with the lines:

protocols = imap
imap_listen = *

And for some reason I had to manually start dovecot the first time:

sudo dovecot

After this, the usual sudo /etc/init.d/dovecot restart seems to work.

Thunderbird

The thunderbird set-up was very straightforward. In fact, I can't really think of anything to say about it. Just set it up with localhost as an IMAP server, and you're set.

Finally, updating .fetchmail

I use fetchmail to download my mail from my external IMAP server, and procmail to put it into my local folders. I had to change procmail to work with Maildir rather than MH folders. The changes turned out to be very simple. In my .procmailrc having defined MAILDIR=$HOME/.maildir I changed lines such as

|/usr/lib/mh/rcvstore +Writing

to

$MAILDIR/.Writing/

Nested folders are similar. You use periods rather than slashes for level separators, not forgetting the leading period. Thus

|/usr/lib/mh/rcvstore +Writing/Tech

becomes

$MAILDIR/.Writing.Tech/

Since Mutt/Dovecot don't use explicit "inbox" folders,

|/usr/lib/mh/rcvstore +inbox

becomes just

$MAILDIR/

The trailing slashes are essential. They indicate that the destination is a Maildir folder and so procmail does the right thing with it.

Mutt is useful for testing that all is OK with your IMAP set-up. Use regular slashes rather than periods for folder separators in IMAP urls, for example:

mutt -f imap://uogbuji@localhost/Writing/Tech

[Uche Ogbuji]

Dare laments Firefox's lack of text area content savings upon crashing. At first I found this strange because Firefox does save text area content in my experience. Then I remembered that I always install SessionSaver. I suspect that's where I might be getting my protection from. It did make me wonder whether XForms content is similarly protected. These days I like to use Chime's XForm document with the FireFox XForms extension to post to copia, and I should test how it handles crashes.

But the main point of this entry is to make a related rant and lazyweb request about Thunderbird. I learned the hard way that unlike Evolution, Thunderbird does not auto-save messages you are composing. That means that my habit of starting drafts and then switching to another task is very dangerous. If I do not manually save the draft and Thunderbird crashes, I lose my work. This is stupid. Evolution would save all compose window content in files named ".evolution-<opaque-id>", and would offer to restore these windows upon restart. If I can't find an extension along the lines of SessionSaver for Thunderbird, I'll have to ditch it. Do any of my LazyWeb friends know of such an extension? Googling and other searching turned up blanks.

[Uche Ogbuji]

You can set a sig with GMail, but not Google Groups. Let's hope Google fixes that soon.

[Uche Ogbuji]

I'm just about fed up with Evolution by now, and I'm looking for ways to loosen my dependency from the monster (see upcoming entry). It tries to be way too smart with your data and makes some basic things matters for hair-pulling. One example concerns e-mail signatures. I have a ~/.signature, as has been the convention since the beginnings of days. I've found it ridiculously hard to get Evolution to work with that. Evolution 2.x allows you to paste in a signature, or set up a script to generate signatures, but not to use an existing file. I tried hacking up a script along the lines of cat ~/.signature but that didn't work because Evolution expects you to use <br> in your script output rather than newlines. WTF! I not using HTML mail, damn it! Yeah, I could hack around that using sed and all that, but I shouldn't have to. After some googling and experimentation I finally figured out a workaround recipe.

1) Create a signature using Edit -> Preferences and then `Composer Preferences -> Signatures -> Add. Give it the namesymlink .sig` and put some easily spotted but inconsequential text in the body. Save it.

2) grep foo ~/.evolution/signatures/* where you replace "foo" with your dummy body text from the last step. This will tell you the file in which Evolution saved the dummy signature.

3) Clobber the dummy signature with a symlink to your .signature file, e.g. ln -sf ~/.signature ~/.evolution/signatures/signature-5

4) Go to the Mail Account preferences and set symlink .sig as the signature for each account on the Identity tab.

5) No Evolution restart required (small mercies, folks)

[Uche Ogbuji]

I've coined the word "Scrolliosis" to describe an affliction that has been thriving in the ecosystem of my e-mail inbox for years.

I get a lot of e-mail. Some of it makes up "hot items", which I'm obliged to tackle right away. These are usually revenue generating activities such as client communications. There are also "warm items", which are non-spam messages that come directly to me or from high-priority mailing lists (only the 4Suite ML in my case). The volume of warm mail alone is overwhelming, and it falls into one of two categories:

1. It comes at a moment when the time I happen to have available exceeds the time that it appears to require, at first glance.

2. It comes at a moment when the time I happen to have available falls short of the time that it appears to require.

Eventually I get a free moment and start on all the stuff that falls into category 2, starting from the most recent and working backwards. Unfortunately, at present I have 366 warm items in my inbox (never mind the 150 or so "cool" items in my pending folder which are basically a matter of get-to-it-in-the-very-unlikely-chance-that-I-ever-can).

This means that once a warm item has scrolled sufficiently far up in my inbox, the chances start to dwindle that I'll get to it in reasonable time. In that case that item has been afflicted by scrolliosis. Today I happen to have set myself a goal of cutting my inbox to 300 messages, so I'll see how much I can rescue from scrolliosis.

The real message is that if you've sent correspondence, and I've not always been prompt, please don't take offense. I'm harried, but probably not trying to be rude. I do also respond to polite reminders. I'm sure many of my colleagues have the same problem.

[Uche Ogbuji]