20 October 2004

I hope that everyone will join us in IRC tomorrow for the EPlugin hackfest! Bring your curiosity, your ideas, and your emacs buffers and vi ..uhm…whatever you call them in vi. The only thing I use vi for is to edit /etc/hosts for some reason, it’s a strange habit but I am incapable of editing that file with anything else.

(Since Garrett outed me for my superb management skills, I had to use the image.)

A couple of hack ideas to supplement JP’s list:

• Build an EPlugin that makes Evolution behave like The Insidious Big Brother Database, automatically adding contact entries for anyone whose mails you answer to a special addressbook for completion purposes. Bonus points for parsing address/phone information out of sigs and adding that to the addressbook.
• Add an EPlugin pre-event for sending a composed message. Then, write an EPlugin that detects when you’re about to send a message that alludes to an attachment that doesn’t exist, and issues a warning. KMail seems to do this by searching for the i18n string “attach”, which is good but could be improved on.
• A dashboard frontend EPlugin that builds and sends cluepackets when you read emails.
• An EPlugin that uses Babelfish/Google to translate emails from a foreign language to a language you understand. There’s a great Firefox plugin from Paul Grave to do this that I use all the time.

It should be fun! JP mentioned the hackfest ends at 5pm Boston time, but I think it’ll probably go a lot later than that; I’ll be joining late and staying late, since I have meetings all morning.