I recently realised that much of the code I find interesting is about interoperability. That is, I'm interested in making sure we can get at data in a range of formats. Work on libtiff, poppler, okular generators and openchange are all examples of that. I also like Qt as a very nice cross-platform API. The convergence of those interests is having Qt-style libraries and tools that can get access to data, especially data in widely used proprietary formats (e.g. those produced by Microsoft products).

I've set up a gitorious repository (http://gitorious.org/microsoft-qt-interop/microsoft-qt-interop) for some of that stuff.

Looks like Microsoft has released the PST format specification.

I don't normally like to link to MSDN, but I'll do it this once:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff385210.aspx

As usual with these documents, I recommend reading the PDF version rather than the HTML. Also, Firefox seems to handle MSDN a bit better than my (KDE 4.3.5) Konqueror.

If you were a mad-keen PIM hacker, and looking for a GSoC project, might be worth a look.

[Thanks to Tom Devey for the heads-up on this]

I'm not at Camp KDE, but instead at LCA 2010 (in Wellington, NZ).

Andrew Tridgell, Andrew Bartlett, Jelmer Vernooij and I will be running "birds of a feather" (BoF) sessions during the last part of the conference (Friday 22 January 2010 starting at 1430 in the "Civic 3" room, which is over in the Town Hall building).

The Okular team has never been all that big. Recently we lost Pino as the maintainer. His reasons are his reasons, but I can't say I blame him. I can personally no longer tolerate the level of abuse that we're seeing on bug reports. The latest example is Wishlist item 157284

I'm unsubscribed from the okular-devel mailing list. I'm not going to be in #okular. I'll still look at XPS bugs if I notice them.

In my ongoing distraction from working on the Akonadi Exchange resource, we released OpenChange 0.9 today.

Release notes:
Improved portability, including a focus on supporting FreeBSD, OpenSolaris and other systems that do not use GNU libraries / shells; and portability fixes for use of the Intel C Compiler and Sun Studio compiler. 64 bit architectures should be better supported in this release.

Preliminary support for Exchange 2003/2007 specific protocols (EcDoConnectEx and EcDoRpcExt2) was added, and redirection support was implemented. This should fix the ecWrongServer (0x478) error that some users encountered while running openchange based software in a clustered Exchange environment. Note that OpenChange is regularly tested with Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007.

Support for encrypted communications between client and server has been added.

I've been working on the next OpenChange release (0.9), and it is getting quite close.

So where are we up to:

• Merge of Ryan Lepinski's Summer of Code project (on converting Exchange calendars to the ICal format) is done.
• Did some more testing with Exchange 2010.
• Julien Kerihuel added support for encrypted connections, which are required in a default install of Exchange 2010.
• The server provisioning works again. (Note: Server is pre-alpha. This is a developer preview only, not intended for any kind of other use.)

Not really a KDE related post, but instead one about the OpenChange project.

OpenChange is a project to implement the Microsoft Exchange / Outlook protocols, and we're creeping up on the 0.9 release. For those not familiar with it, the aim is to be wire-level compatible, so that you can use a FOSS client (such as Evolution or an Akonadi client) with an unmodified Exchange server.

Once again, its been a long time since I blogged. I have been doing a bit of OpenChange development though.

Mostly its been minor bug fixes, cleanups and so on. This weekend I decided to take on something a bit more substantial. Email rules handling between Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange are pretty sophisticated, and OpenChange didn't do too much of it. I ended up having to get all the way down to the unmarshalling data structures from the RPC calls to understand why things didn't work. Its starting to come together now, with the condition part of the rule mostly under control (although not complete) and the actions part of the rule hopefully not too hard once I get conditions sorted.

As reported in a previous blog, I've spent some time working with Taras Glek on Dehydra and Treehydra.

It is stabilising and getting to be easier to build. However I thought I'd show a simple example of actually using GCC and Dehydra to check for a policy decision, along the lines of the things that EBN does.

Based on a comment from Taras Glek on my feeble attempts to get a GCC plugin going, I did some work on Dehydra / Treehydra. Its an interesting approach, and one that benefits from the GCC plugin API.