lfetool T-Shirts?!

So, yeah... waaaaay too early for a T-shirt; the code has just gone from 0.1.x to 0.2.x. But, how could we resist: the project logo is retro like woodblock prints!

Earlier today, lfetool converted to using plugins (easier for contributors to play!), and hopefully later tonight YAWS + Bootstrap support will land. Regardless, there's tons more work to do, and what's more motivating for new work than a T-shirt? As you can see, we had no choice.

So let's get some. T-shirts, that is.

The lfetool logo is on the front, and Robert Virding's example Fibonacci lfescript code is on the back (with the lfetool command that generates the script at the top). Here's the front of the T-shirt:

And here's the back:

We've got a CustomInk sign-up sheet that you can add your name to if you want a shirt. I'll coordinate with folks individually, once we meet our minimum number (we're going to need to use paypal with payment upfront). Due to the colors of the source code on the back, the minimum order is 15. This will put the shirts at $22 a piece + $5 to send it to you. I've just ordered 2; 13 more go!

lfetool 0.2 Released

This release of lfetool has a bunch of new interesting features -- too much to cover in a tweet, so it's getting a little blog post ;-)

Here are the high-level bits that should make users' lives better:

• New yaws project type, provided for building basic web sites; includes the exemplar project as a dependency for generating HTML with S-expressions.
• Every project now gets TravisCI support by default.
• Unit tests, integration tests, and systems tests now each have their own dir.
• Tests now get run in parallel for faster run times.
• Added support for running on Linux and *BSD systems.
• Added unit tests for lfetool itself (shUnit) (for checking skeleton-generation and tool options).
• lfetool has a new logo :-)

Note that the version jumped from 0.1.2 to 0.2.0 due to the strong improvements in quality and feature set of the tool. Forth-coming features include:

• Support for an e2 service skeleton project.
• Support for a YAWS-RESTful service skeleton project.
• Support for YAWS embedded in a skeleton OTP application.
• Support for YAWS + Exemplar + Bootstrap projects
• Support for slide decks with Exemplare + Reveal.js

If you've got more ideas for the lfetool wishlist, post a comment here or send an email to the LFE mailing list.

Twisted Mail Server: The Conclusion

Holy old code, Batman -- it's been about 2.5 years since I first blogged about the Twisted mail server I cobbled together. In the intervening time, I've received tons of emails and instant messages requesting that the code be put up somewhere. Well, that time has come...

I recently decommissioned a box I had at tummy.com which was my primary mail server for several years. After many years of qmail and a few months with Postfix, I wanted a solution that I had more immediate control over. At that time, Gmail for Domains was just announced and I became one of the beta testers for it. However, it was missing a few critical features, so I sat down and put together a mail server for myself. Abe Fetting had some nice examples in his O'Reilly book, so I started there. Then I jumped into the Twisted source code and discovered the rest that I needed.

A year or so later, Gmail for Domains (now Google Apps for business) was rockin' out, so I started moving my mail there. I eventually aliased the remainder of my domains and then stopped using the Twisted mail server. I kept the tummy.com box around for a while for DNS, but due to a tightening of the budget at home, I later had to pull the plug. When I reviewed the backup files from the server, I saw the old mail code and put it at the top of the list for my down-time projects.

I've sort of done that, but the process is incomplete. In the spirit of r0ml's OSCON 2008 talk, I'm placing this code in a public space for people to play with, find bugs in, report them, add patches, and branch from. The project page on Launchpad.net is here:

https://launchpad.net/tx/txmailserver

There are a couple non-standard parts of the code (in particular, the account, alias, and mail list management), but it can be improved very easily. The Dspam stuff was nascent at best (I didn't end up using it in production). Also, the relaying really needs to be looked into to make sure that it's done safely. A quick task someone could jump on right away is to convert the copious print statments to twisted.python.log calls.

Having the code in the state that it's in could be a lot of fun, really. The code base is tiny and there's nothing too tricky going on. For those that haven't had a chance to play with Bazaar, you can easily branch it to your own lp home dir, and if you make some cool improvements, I can easily merge those back in to the main branch. Looking at the list of branches, potential users and developers will be able to easily see the efforts that others have made. txMailServer could end up being a nice little piece of utilitarian code for folks...

Enjoy! And sorry it took so long :-(