Massively Parallel Procrastination

Say -- I'm going in a swimming, I am. Don't you wish you could? But of course you'd druther work -- wouldn't you? Course you would!" Tom contemplated the boy a bit, and said: "What do you call work?" "Why ain't that work?" Tom resumed his whitewashing, and answered carelessly: "Well, maybe it is, and maybe it aint. All I know, is, it suits Tom Sawyer." "Oh come, now, you don't mean to let on that you like it?" The brush continued to move. "Like it? Well I don't see why I oughtn't to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?" That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped nibbling his apple. Tom swept his brush daintily back and forth—stepped back to note the effect -- added a touch here and there-criticised the effect again -- Ben watching every move and getting more and more interested, more and more absorbed. Presently he said: "Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little."

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.11.3.

This is the fourth DEVELOPMENT release in the 5.11.x series leading to a stable release of Perl 5.12.0. You can find a list of high-profile changes in this release in the file "perl5113delta.pod" inside the distribution.

Perl 5.11.3 is, hopefully, the last release of Perl 5.11.x before code freeze for Perl 5.12.0. At that point, we will only make changes which fix regressions from previous released versions of Perl or which resolve issues we believe would make a stable release of Perl 5.12.0 inadvisable.

You can (or will shortly be able to) download the 5.11.3 release from:

http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.11.3/

The release's SHA1 signatures are:
MD5: 0051020f8ae2a89c9d624e01ed56b02c perl-5.11.3.tar.bz2 SHA1: 7fe87005437002f0b515d983429d0bfba36398ac perl-5.11.3.tar.bz2

This release corresponds to commit 9c3f2640bc in Perl's git repository. It is tagged as 'v5.11.3'.

We welcome your feedback on this release. If you discover issues with Perl 5.11.3, please use the 'perlbug' tool included in this distribution to report them. If Perl 5.11.3 works well for you, please use the 'perlthanks' tool included with this distribution to tell the all-volunteer development team how much you appreciate their work.

If you write software in Perl, it is particularly important that you test your software against development releases. While we strive to maintain source compatibility with prior stable versions of Perl wherever possible, it is always possible that a well-intentioned change can have unexpected consequences. If you spot a change in a development version which breaks your code, it's much more likely that we will be able to fix it before the next stable release. If you only test your code against stable releases of Perl, it may not be possible to undo a backwards-incompatible change which breaks your code.

Perl 5.11.3 represents approximately one month of development since Perl 5.11.2 and contains 61407 lines of changes across 396 files from 40 authors and committers:

Abigail, Alex Davies, Alexandr Ciornii, Andrew Rodland, Andy Dougherty, Bram, brian d foy, Chip Salzenberg, Chris Williams, Craig A. Berry, Daniel Frederick Crisman, David Golden, Dennis Kaarsemaker, Eric Brine, Father Chrysostomos, Gene Sullivan, Gerard Goossen, H. Merijn Brand, Hugo van der Sanden, Jan Dubois, Jerry D. Hedden, Jesse Vincent, Jim Cromie, Karl Williamson, Leon Brocard, Max Maischein, Michael Breen, Moritz Lenz, Nicholas Clark, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Reini Urban, Ricardo Signes, Stepan Kasal, Steve Hay, Steve Peters, Tim Bunce, Tony Cook, Vincent Pit and Zefram.

Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN community for helping Perl to flourish.

Notable changes in this release:

• Perl is shipped with Unicode version 5.2, itself released in October 2009.
• Perl can now handle every Unicode character property.
• The experimental 'legacy' pragma, introduced with Perl 5.11.2 has been removed. Its functionality has been replaced with the 'feature' pragma.
• Numerous CPAN "toolchain" modules have been updated to what we hope are the final release versions for Perl 5.12.0.
• Many crashing bugs or regressions from earlier releases of Perl were fixed for this release.

Development versions of Perl are released monthly on or about the 20th of the month by a monthly "release manager". You can expect following upcoming releases:

• January 20 - Ricardo Signes
• February 20 - Steve Hay
• March 20 - Ask Bjørn Hansen

Buy for Free?

I got to play with a nook today.

At lunch, I called the local B&N-operated college book store and asked if they had a nook. They confirmed that they had one and that I could take a bit of time to play with it.

Showing up, I saw a nook on its stand and second nook just headed off into the back room with a manager.  The display nook was just powering up. 

Boot time felt a little longer than the Kindle, but I didn't have mine around for comparison.

First up. The UI.  Aside from paging, all your interaction takes place on the touch display...and it's a little weird. In about 20 minutes of playing around, I didn't feel like I "got" the user interaction paradigm. Sometimes scrolling lists were in the UI. Sometimes they were on the eInk display.  I found myself really missing the Kindle's joystick.

Wifi bookstore browsing was a little spotty. I didn't get a good feel for how the experience is "supposed" to feel.

I decided to try to "share" one of the books that the demo nook had "bought" with myself. Adding contacts is really easy. You just type in a username and an email address on the touchscreen.  I didn't make a single typo. The keyboard isn't quite the standard Android keyboard - there's actually _less_ visual feedback. But it worked pretty well.

When I couldn't find any way to "loan" me one of the demo unit's books, I asked the B&N staffer. He told me that for now, "only a very limited number of books are actually available to loan."  We tried to find one we could loan me. We couldn't.

It was at about this time that I casually asked if it might be possible to "try one of the ebooks from my laptop."  I was dispatched to the Information Desk to ask permission.  The local staff weren't aware of a policy, but decided that it was too risky for now and told me to check back in a day or two after they talk to corporate.

So, dear readers, no "adb logtrace" output for you...yet. 

While I was there, a couple 20-something guys came in and chatted up the B&N staffer for a bit. One of them said to the other - "Man, when my girlfriend gets hers, I' am so hacking it." They went on to mention that it looked like it would be a lot easier to hack than the Kindle.  I kept my mouth shut.

Next, the PDF reader.  It came as a surprise to the B&N staffer that there were already a couple PDFs on the Nook.  The good news: Reflow is there. Font size and typeface are user-selectable.  The bad news - Zoom and Pan-n-Scan were nowhere to be found.

Random tidbits:  the back is removable. The B&N staffer claimed that nooks will come with several covers in different hues.  I wasn't allowed to see the user-changeable battery.  Every nook has an email address @nook.com - Presumably that works the same way as Amazon's "mail your docs here" service. 

The B&N staffer kept trying to push me to coverflow mode and away from "list the titles and authors of your books on the big, easily readable screen" mode.  I'm not really a fan of the coverflow UI for "pick between my 10 books."

The book-buying experience was pretty seamless, though it felt like there was less discoverability in the bookstore compared to Amazon's on-device store.  Maybe I was just doing it wrong.  I did find and download several free books that came from Google Books.  They warned that they were uncorrected scans, but the quality was pretty reasonable.  They contained a mix of text and images and were quite readable.  The weirdest bit was trying to download a free book from the Google Books corpus: I had to click a big "Buy for free?" button and then confirm that I really wanted the book.

K-9 Mail 2.000 for Android

I'm pleased to announce the release of K-9 Mail version 2.000. This release represents several months of development and about 7000 lines of code changes.

The biggest "exciting new thing" in this release is Dan Applebaum's work to bring us true Push Mail using IMAP IDLE. I've been using it for about a month now and can no longer live without it. On top of that, we've closed about 50 bugs across all aspects of the application.  I've included a list of bugs known to be resolved, as well as an abbreviated change list below. 

You can download K-9 2.0 from the Android market. (There's a good chance that you're already using a 2.0 release candidate if you've been regularly updating K-9 from the market.)

As always, we welcome your feedback. The best place to report issues is at http://k9mail.googlecode.com. The best place to discuss K-9 is the k-9-mail mailinglist at http://groups.google.com/group/k-9-mail

Changes in K-9 2.000 (since 1.011)

    * *Push mail for IMAP accounts* using IMAP IDLE - danapple0

    * Accelerated message list loading using pipelined architecture - danapple0

    * More efficient background queue processing - danapple0

    * Improved unread-count tracking - danapple0

    * Improved threading model in MessagingController for higher efficiency and better responsiveness - danapple0

    * Disable polling and pushing when no network is available - danapple0

    * Provide explicit menu items to send messages from the Outbox - danapple0

    * Restore operation of hot keys and zoom when viewing a message - danapple0

    * Restore detection of hard keyboard to control display of navigation buttons when viewing a message - danapple0

    * Persist a copy of the message list when rotating for faster response - danapple0

    * Better deletion of IMAP messages and logging when deletion failures occur - danapple0

    * WebDAV / MS Exchange improvements: move, copy, delete and mark as unread now work. - danapple0

    * Fixes for WebDAV connection problems. - danapple0

    * Fixed bug where wrong messages is displayed after screen rotation (issue 556) - baolongnt

    * Respect global 'Background data' preference and provide ability to turn of all synchronization. - danapple0

    * Fixes for running on Android 2.0 - danapple0, jessev

    * SMTP and IMAP protocol fixes - danapple0

    * "Delete from server" is now the default for IMAP andxzz WebDAV accounts - danapple0

    * New sort-by and reverse-sort icons by Vincent Lum

    * Made the date column a bit wider to fully view time timestamp and view more of the date in landscape mode - baolongnt

    * We now accept all mime types when handling the android.intent.action.SEND intent - baolongnt

    * Normalize padding in setup widgets; turn off "fading edges" in setup widgets - jessev

    * Added content-type detection using file name extension (This adds better integration with OI File Manager which implements the ACTION_GET_CONTENT intent) - baolongnt

    * Remove duplicated "make this account the default" option during setup - jessev

    * Give the user the choice of whether to enable Push as they create a new IMAP account. - jessev

    * Make the status messages for folders that are being synced with push a bit prettier - jessev

    * Don't show folder choosers before we have a working account -jessev

    * Reorganize the Account Settings page, regrouping options by "what a reasonable user might want to change at the same time" - jessev

    * Make our use of email/mail consistent. It's "mail" except for "Email address" - jessev

    * Rephrase a number of unclear or oddly phrased messages (many dating from AOSP) - jessev

    * Slightly better MessageView fit-to-screen and scrollbar flow - jessev

    * First pass attempt at fixing the "Android 2.0 breaks contacts lookup" issue

    * K-9 now targets Android 1.6 (with 1.5 support) to support QVGA devices - jessev    

    * K-9 now  provides 2 - 24 poll check periods - danapple0

    * Account setup UI overhaul - jessev 

    * Record permanent failures into K9mail-errors -danapple0

    * K-9 now detects "Aw:" as being the same as "Re:" - jessev

    * Enable fast scroll in message view, list view and "pick a folder" dialogs -jessev

    * Sort the "NONE" folder to the top of the "auto-expand folder" list -jessev

    * All our layouts now use dip instead of px, for great weird-resolution weird-screen-size justice - jessev

    * Better italian translation - tauromenion

    * Fixed issue with reply icon in subject in message view screen not being set properly when navigating around using up and down arrows - baolongnt

    * Displays a warning and allows K-9 to continue in some situations that otherwise cause a crash.  -danapple0

    * Eliminate secret debug preferences activity.  Add debug preferences to global preferences. - danapple0

    * WebDAV: Automatically add / separators if not supplied by user.  -danapple0

    * WebDAV: Set authentication header for downloading and sending messages, so that those functions work with sites using Basic authentication. -danapple0

    * WebDAV: Don't swallow log Exceptions.  Instead, allow Exceptions to percolate up to higher levels so that they can be logged into K9mail-errors. - danapple0

    * WebDAV: Provide appendMessages function, so that Drafts get stored on the server - danapple0

    * Prevent a crash and put up a Toast when invalid data is entered early in the new-account setup workflow - danapple0

    * MessageListener.synchronizeMailboxNewMessage() does not requires a context to be passed anymore. -baolongnt

    * We use the application as context when broadcasting message received intents - baolongnt

    * Refactored intent constant classes - baolongnt

    * Better icon for the About menu item - baolongnt

    * Added intent for viewing individial messages - baolongnt

    * Issues fixed in since 1.0x:

      * Issue 4 - danapple0

      * Issue 44 - baolongnt

      * Issue 59 - danapple0

      * Issue 133 - danapple0

      * Issue 290 - danapple0

      * Issue 448 - danapple0

      * Issue 482 - danapple0

      * Issue 538 - danapple0

      * Issue 551 - danapple0

      * Issue 556 - baolongnt

      * Issue 573 - mpredosin

      * Issue 574 - danapple0

      * Issue 577 - danapple0

      * Issue 587 - danapple0

      * Issue 587 - danapple0

      * Issue 589 - baolongnt

      * Issue 589 - baolongnt

      * Issue 606 - mark.himsley

      * Issue 607 - baolongnt

      * Issue 628 - danapple0

      * Issue 650 - danapple0

      * Issue 651 - danapple0

      * Issue 654 - danapple0

      * Issue 656 - danapple0

      * Issue 657 - danapple0

      * Issue 668 - danapple0

      * Issue 673 - danapple0

      * Issue 675 - danapple0

      * Issue 682 - danapple0

      * Issue 696 - danapple0

      * Issue 708 - themaninthesuitcase (updated by danapple0)

      * Issue 710 - baolongnt

      * Issue 712 - danapple0

      * Issue 722 - danapple0

      * Issue 733 - danapple0

      * Issue 737 - danapple0

      * Issue 738 - danapple0

      * Issue 742 - danapple0

      * Issue 742 - danapple0

      * Issue 744 - jesse

      * Issue 747 - danapple0

      * Issue 752 - danapple0

      * Issue 753 - baolongnt

      * Issue 761 - baolongnt

      * Issue 762 - baolongnt