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Have a haircut before going to toilet ?

QRESYNC – efficient IMAP synchronization

	QRESYNC has been implemented in tinymail. http://pvanhoof.be/blog/index.php/2007/10/18/qresync-support-in-tinymail
In short, without implementing this extension, synchronization of IMAP needs to fetch all flags for the mailbox to know which flags changed and which message has been deleted (no response will be returned for the given message): that’s how etpanX currently works. I’ll have to implement it in libEtPan! …

Icon Design in Paris

“Assembly point”

Highway and Flats

Backup, iPhone, dev

1. Backup

I finally got a solution for incremental backups: rsync allow this. When synchronizing, there is an option to copy the files that will be modified or deleted to an other folder (creation of file is not tracked). Let’s call that folder the increment folder.

a/ I will have a backup folder that is synchronized with the folder I want to backup b/ There is one increment folder per day. So that if I want to restore a given version of a file, I use the backup folder and apply each increment until the desired version. The only drawback of that method is that I don’t track the date when a given file appeared.

2. iPhone

These last days, I tried the iPhone.

a/ Cool things: - With this phone, we finally got rid of the PDA pen. Touchscreen user interface controls are finally the size of the finger. - The most interesting thing in that Phone was the SMS part: The SMS are classified by person and shown as a conversation.

b/ Not-so-cool - The touchscreen-keyboard is rather difficult to use. - Calling a contact in its address book is less easy than on a sony ericsson W800/W810/W880.

3. etPanX

Implementation of filter backend is done and matches the description in my previous post. Still the configuration UI to create. Filtering is not blocking the user interface: that’s nice.

Now, I have to think about virtual folders (evolution semantic), which are called “smart folders” on Mac OS X Mail.app.

4. libetpan

Documentation of libetpan was a pain to maintain. It was static, in SGML. Nobody knew how to edit it. Nobody know how to build the HTML from the SGML.

Still, I think that doxygen (or javadoc-like stuff) does not fit the needs since this is an automatically generated documentation. This is not human-oriented. On every doxygen documentation, I was wondering where to start reading. Code samples are not easy to add or I am missing something. I switch to something more dynamic: a wiki. It is based on mediawiki. We now have a more collaborative way to edit the documentation. - We lost the multi-format output but since HTML was the most used, that’s ok. - It’s less easy to get an offline documentation. - The code is not synchronized with the documentation.

5. Reading

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information – Edward Tufte