I was, at RJK's suggestion, going to write a script to wrap jed and determine the first line of a mail message. Then it occured to me that the first line of most messages is more or less the same, so I've gone with the far easier short term solution of always starting up on the same line. It's right 90% of the time and far easier. I may do the proper thing later.

I decided to actually start reporting some of my spam. After a bit of research, the most promising antispam reporting unix tool I found was Ricochet. It's fairly nice, although a little overzealous.

It has an interactive mode for controlling who gets emailed - this totally failed to work on FreeBSD 6.1. It appeared to be doing some very dodgy things with getc in perl to read individual characters from a tty, without setting up the tty modes correctly. I did a hacked version of the main script that uses Term::ReadLine and seems to more or less work, although it's a bit ugly. I mailed the maintainers about it, but given that it was last updated in 2003 I don't expect much action.

I like the JLJ livejournal client, but I was distressed to find that it didn't have a Debian package. I've now created a debian jlj package to remedy this lack.

It's my first go at making a debian package, so it's unofficial, may be horribly buggy, the man page is unfinished...

I've been wanting to learn Ruby for ages. My first ruby program is lj-checkfriends.rb, a small script that logs into your livejournal account and reports if people have added or removed you as a friend since it was last run.

To configure it, set your username, password, and path-to-ruby at the top of the file.

Inspired by the lj-fc script by Simon Burr, which is doubtless much better, but using other people's code doesn't teach you Ruby :)

I've always been a big fan of the zsh shell. Lately I switched back to it at home after a long time using bash. Everything was going wonderfully, until I decided to get my character sets organised and switch to a unicode locale.

The zsh version in Debian stable is 4.2.5, which has extremely poor unicode support. Typing characters such as £ at the prompt confuses things, and lets you do corrupted things like backspacing over the prompt display. After some investigation, I found the problem was zsh - in the 4.2 series, unicode support is very limited, and you need to switch to the 4.3 development series for things to start working sanely.

First I tried to download the source deb from Debian testing and rebuild it on stable - this failed, so I went for letting someone else do it for me, and am now happily using the 4.3.2 zsh build from backports.org. And now I can type £ and have it be displayed properly and treated properly as a single character. In theory this is a development release, so there may be other problems, but from what I can tell zsh is very stable even in the development series.

I've been using darwinports for a while, but I finally created my first port - for the jlj livejournal client - and got it accepted.