Sylpheed-Claws 2.2.0 was released today, along with the accompanying Extra Plugins package. There were, of course, several improvements and fixes implemented, as can be seen from the Release Notes. My particular favourite was 'Fix returned quick search results when search term contains an underscore', not the most glamourous change perhaps, but the most practical for my uses.

Releaseforge made the job easier, as usual, with the added bonus that my (simple, one-liner) patch was recently accepted, (Releaseforge version 0.9.9).

Other recent news on the Sylpheed-Claws project includes the replacement of the phpwiki version of the Claws FAQ with a MediaWiki version. This conversion was helped in part by the PHPWiki to MediaWiki online syntax converter, which got the conversion started and cut down on some of the manual editing that was necessary.

The Gnomaws theme was also updated, (the Spam/Ham icons were added), and made available from the the Themes page. This theme is the work of Aleksandar Urošević.

The Galeon browser has the great image-blocker feature, (which has since become more common in other browsers), enabling the blocking of advert-serving sites. Unfortunately, flash adverts have become more and more widely used and cannot be blocked using the image-blocker feature, and these flash adverts, with the moving images and other gimmicks, can be incredibly irritating. They were irritating for me until yesterday, when I discovered a method to block them. Sure, I could have just uninstalled the shockwave-flash plugin, but very, (very), occasionally flash does serve some valid purpose, (although an example of such a purpose escapes me at present), so I prefer to keep it installed.

Here is the method, it is not foolproof, but it suffices in the absense of any better solution:
Create (or edit) the file ~/.galeon/mozilla/galeon/chrome/userContent.css and copy/paste the following code into it.

/* hide flash banner adverts */
embed[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"][width="468"][height="60"] {
        display: none !important;
        visibility: hidden !important;
}
embed[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"][width="728"][height="90"] {
        display: none !important;
        visibility: hidden !important;
}
embed[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"][width="300"][height="250"] {
        display: none !important;
        visibility: hidden !important;
}

The transcript of Richard Stallman's talk on GPLv3 in Torino, 18th March 2006, is reproduced on the FSF Europe website. If you've been following the emergence of GPLv3, the topics that are covered will not surprise you. The question and answer sequence is interesting as the dialogue is less dry and Stallman's didactic approach becomes more visible. A member of the audience puts forward a question but is unable to finish, "…do you think the fight against Digital Rights Managements and Trusted Comp…", "Digital Restrictions Management, and Treacherous Computing", interrupts Stallman, "Don't use the enemy's propaganda terms, every time you use those terms you are supporting the enemy". I like that. It also brings to mind his comments on the term intellectual property at the top of the talk. Stallman then tells it how it is: "…governments mostly are not very democratic anymore. They mostly are the pro-consuls of the mega corporations, their job is to keep us in line under the rule of the empire. That's why they run for office, they get into office, they do what the emperor — the emperor being the mega corporations — tells them to do, and their job is explaining to us why they can't do what we want them to do. It's very very sad and once in a while somebody has enough courage to refuse to obey, somebody like [sounds like Hugo Chavez]." In the absense of a democratic government, Stallman goes on to give some sound consumer advice on the purchase of DVDs: "If you can't copy it - don't buy it!" There's no need to confuse the issue. He is then questioned about the fact that it is he alone who decides what modifications of the licence will be done, he replies, (rather suspectly in my opinion, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt), "I don't know other people who can do this", but expresses the hope "that the process that's going on now will help develop people who can be part of some group activity". I think he's kept it true so far, and I hope, I believe, he will continue to do so.

Two days ago, January 30th, saw the release of version 2.0.0 of Sylpheed-Claws; yesterday saw the release of the accompanying Extra Plugins package. A lot of extra Claws-hours went into the build up to this release, (as the Release Notes and ChangeLog demonstrate), due to the fondness for, and the relevance that is attached to, whole numbers. In addition to this, 16 translations were updated, most of them complete, and a new user manual was created. So, firm handshakes all round. 2.0.1 here we come.

pc-news.org has conducted an interview with Eben Moglen, an attorney representing the Free Software Foundation, in which he discusses the differences between version 2 and the forthcoming version 3 of the GPL. The changes, which he describes as an evolution of the license with no fundamental change, are aimed primarily at the legal environment and patent laws. He says that patent laws are a form of legal subsidy to business, and goes on to be critical of companies and their usage of free software, like TiVo, who try to straddle the line between freedom and un-freedom just a little too closely, the movie industry, and others.

What TiVo needs to do – what everybody needs to do who makes electronic devices – is to stop injuring users to help movie companies. We don’t want our software used in a way which batters the head of the user to please somebody else.

Read the whole interview:
Defender of the GPL

I finally wrote a new perl script, filter_conv_new.pl, to convert Sylpheed's newer, (>= 0.9.99), type of filter rules to Sylpheed-Claws filtering rules. This complements the previous script that converted the old format Sylpheed rules.

Download: http://www.claws-mail.org/tools/sylpheed-filter_conv_new.tar.gz

Usage: perl filter_conv_new.pl

Requirement: XML::SimpleObject

The script looks for filter.xml, the file that holds Sylpheed's filter rules, first in '~/.sylpheed-2.0', the config directory of Sylpheed >= 2.0.0, failing that, it looks in the old config directory, '~/.sylpheed', and converts all enabled rules, writing its output to '~/[CLAWS CONFIG DIR]/matcherrc' , (the script determines the location of Claws' config directory). Only those rules that are enabled in Sylpheed are converted, as, in Sylpheed-Claws, all rules are enabled at all times. I thought about adding an option to enable the conversion of disabled rules, but decided to leave it out, at least for now.

It passed all my tests, and seems to manage with any filter rule that Sylpheed can throw at it, so that's that: finis!

UPDATE
Since Claws Mail (formerly Sylpheed-Claws) allowed disabling of filter rules this script was updated to support enabled/disabled rule conversion. The same URL above will get you the updated script.

Since yesterday, (in SVN), the KIPI plugin SendImages has support for Sylpheed-Claws. This means that DigiKam, KimDaba, ShowImg, and GwenView can now all send images via Sylpheed-Claws. Sweet!

Thanks goes to Tom Albers for modifying and committing my patch.

I was glancing over the Planet Gentoo RSS feed, (using Ticho's RSSyl plugin for Sylpheed-Claws), and noticed a link in a post to an entry entitled "MP3 for free" in J5's blog. It turns out that this mp3 for free is a product by a company called Fluendo, the product being an mp3 decoding plug-in for the GStreamer framework. The J5's blog entry puts forward some, in my opinion, dubious views and arguments, and points to a further entry on another blog with another misnomer, Perfect Present, which has more weak arguments.

To cut to the chase, this thing pretty much sums up the diluting of Free Software that I alluded to in a previous post. The elementary error is in confusing the meaning of Free in Free Software. This free that is talked of is as in free beer and not as in freedom, the point stressed is that the enduser can download it for free. The plugin is released under the MIT licence, but, due to the mp3 patents, and the licensing agreement Fluendo has with Thomson and Frauhenofer, "the no-cost license from Fluendo only covers desktop use, all other uses of the binaries need a separate license". According to Perfect Present, developers can download the source code and work on improving it in their free time then submit their patches to Fluendo who will then improve thei