Feminism as a condition

2010-01-17T22:39:46Z

I’ve been translating Quassel into Russian for some time now. That’s in spite of my despise to all the localized software. I just thought it would be good to popularize a project that is almost, but not quite, entirely like the best IRC client ever. I don’t know if the translation or a news post on one of the major Russian Linux users community sites somehow helped it, but now I see more and more Russian IRC users using Quassel.

Even though I don’t use Quassel anymore, I still feel it is my responsibility to continue updating the translation. Recently, I’ve had a free moment and, as usual, pulled from Quassel repository and rebased my russian branch. And what do you think? It did not rebase cleanly, so git had to do its merge magic! Somebody touched my translation! Dey tuk mah job! I’ve read git log for the translation file and saw a commit whose author, and I quote, “Fixed gender-specific language and some punctuation mistakes in the Russian translation”. Punctuation mistakes were there, I admit it, but what the bloody Mary means “gender-specific language”?

Turns out, I have been a chauvinist and women discriminator for the better part of my life, because I translated past tense verbs into past tense verbs. True, in Russian they must have one of the three genders, and I used masculine (as did xchat’s translators, kvirc’s translators, and tons of software before this point). The phrases like “Mary joined #channel”, where grammatically Mary is supposed to have balls, is of course somewhat stupid. But that’s not because I, or anyone else in the world hate women! That’s because “Mary is joining #channel” looks way more stupid! And that’s what was introduced by aforementioned commit.

Somehow it feels related to other Debian guys (and gals, yeah) issues. They just don’t have anything better to do.

My translation is always available at Github, branch russian. It’s with masculine verbs in past tense. If you feel offended by it, just merge it with master, I won’t come to your house and slaughter you. Honestly.

irssi vs. Quassel, or There and Back Again

2010-01-17T22:32:39Z

Once there was irssi. And it was good. I liked the way I could leave it running in screen and use it wherever there was a working ssh-client. I liked the plain and simple Perl scripting and tons of scripts available. I liked the way other people reacted seeing IRC client in terminal. It even tab-completed file names.

But there wasn’t everything fine with it. For once, I tended to forget I have something running in terminal. Highlights, being confined to konsole window, were unable to attract any of my attention. Also copying and pasting text sucked a little, but that’s more of a nit-picking.

‘ … I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it’s very difficult to find anyone.’

Then I heard of Quassel, and it seemed perfect. It ran fine, supported many stuff like SSL, automatic NickServ identification, had a nice concepts of “Buffer views” and “Monitors”. Scripts were not available until very recently, but I experienced no special need for them. Tab-completion worked only alphabetically and sucked at non-english nicks, but that was fixed.

First time I noticed something was wrong was when Quassel core crashed having ran out of disk space. The developers’ position on this was that Quassel relying heavily on database backend can’t work when the database is unwritable. In short: whenever Quassel can’t log your message, it dies. That struck me as not quite reasonable, but it’s manageable.

Quassel’s database-orientedness makes it also eat a lot of disk I/O and space. And I don’t even mention RAM usage. So it is hardly usable on slow hardware at all.

I can also mention a hard Qt dependency of all the Quassel’s internals. Can’t say that is bad, since Qt is a great framework, and I suppose it made developing Quassel more fun and decreased PITA coefficient. Still, you can hardly imagine implementing Quassel-compatible client or core without Qt. So you lose all the devices, Qt hasn’t been ported on.

To the end of his days Bilbo could never remember how he found himself outside, without a hat, a walking stick or any money, or anything that he usually took when he went out; leaving his second breakfast half-finished and quite unwashed-up, pushing his keys into Gandalf’s hands, and running as fast as his furry feet could carry him down the lane, past the great Mill, across The Water, and then on for a mile or more.

Summing up, I am back to irssi now. It uses about five times less RAM, it doesn’t eat up disk I/O, logs take substantially less than 100 megabytes per month (and can be grepped and gzipped and cleaned). I can run it on my router, I can connect to it having just ssh, or Putty. I can even connect to it using any other IRC client, which solves most of the old problems.

Of course it doesn’t download logs when I scroll up, it doesn’t have nice search with nice highlights, it doesn’t have nice web previews. But I think I’ll live with that. Or even hack into xchat to make it do nice things Quassel can do.

Can’t blame Quassel developers for anything. They are great devoted guys that made a great IRC client, and they continue working on it, so if you don’t care about bad things I’ve said here (or if you have powerful server, tons of disk space, love to use SQL to grep logs and own only Qt 4.4 powered devices) then Quassel is for you.

‘You are a very fine person, Mr Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!’
‘Thank goodness!’ said Bilbo laughing, and handed Gandalf the tobacco-jar.

Hades Blag blog posts with tag intersection quassel

Feminism as a condition

irssi vs. Quassel, or There and Back Again