colin@
colino.net

I have my new laptop! It’s an Asus M6BC that works well, apart from the usual culprit, the winmodem. I don’t care about it :-)
It’s quite fast, it’s less fastidious to recompile sylpheed-claws than with the iBook…
Thanks again to all the donators!

We have a user from the twilight zone (although he tries to hide as a French). He always has some unreproduceable bugs with stack traces straight from the X-Files. Hopefully, there’s often a real reason. Excerpt of the last bug-chasing-session (slightly edited):

<wwp>   any volunteer for a short bug chasing session?
<wwp>   I got a brand new one!
<claws> really?
<wwp>   and re-pro-duc-ti-ble
[...wwp describes his bug...]
<colin> I can't reproduce :-)
<claws> i can't reproduce it either
<colin> your backtraces show crashes inside gtk_clist_unselect_all and GTK_EVENTS_FLUSH()
<wwp>   hm
<colin> it looks like some compilation issue or something strange, too
<wwp>   hmmmm
<colin> you already had crashes in GTK_EVENTS_FLUSH(), if i remember well, that was when you had a strange binary
<wwp>   a strange binary..
<colin> yeah, remember, the one compiled with two differents gccs ;-)
<wwp>   let me check if gtk+ 2.6 has been compiled w/ the same compiler
<wwp>   shit you're right
<wwp>   ff........ckkkk
<claws> [slap]

So, after the shower that my iBook got, it doesn’t boot anymore… Nothing happens at all when I press the power button (either on battery, either on A/C). I have to replace it, but as I lack funding to do so, I’ve sent a call for donations on the sylpheed-claws-users mailing list:

Hi,

there’s been a big storm in Toulouse yesterday evening, and the roof of
our apartment’s “office” leaked a few litres of rain water, which fell
just on my iBook, during one or two hours, while we were away. Gory
details are on my blog for the curious…

After taking it apart and letting it dry for the whole day, I tried to
boot it back, and it’s dead. :-(

So I’m really in need of a new computer now, as my girlfriend’s PC is a
really outdated thing that works when it agrees to and compiles Claws
in about one hour; but I completely lack the money to buy it. The laptop
I plan on buying costs about 1200 euros.

If you users want to help me, it’d be really, really nice of you to
donate something to my paypal account (which is colin@colino.net)… It
would work with about 120 donations of 10 euros… Given the
“approximate subscribers’ count” stated by Sourceforge, that could work.

Many thanks,
Colin

So far, I’ve received about 60€. Thanks to the people who donated…

Insert insanities here.
When we left to Valleraugue for our holidays, my coworker Cristina offered to take care of our cat. Just the day after we left, she called us with some good news: our water boiler (200 litres) basically exploded from the top, leaving lots of water in the hall. She took care of it (many thanks again!), cut the water supply, and we handled it when coming back. From August 2nd to 9th, we only had cold water to shower. Finally, yesterday morning, the plumber came and changed the boiler, and we enjoyed a normal shower. Then we left for a restaurant to celebrate that.

During the dinner, a quite big thunderstorm happened and we joked about how I’ll find dead servers at work; then we came back to our place, and… found that the room that serves as our ‘office’ was flooded! Lots of water had came in through the roof, and the roof of the office was completely cracked and deformed by something that looks suspiciously like many litres of water. We quickly put a bucket where the water fell down, then proceeded to remove the important stuff from the room. My iBook, you guessed it, was located just at the vertical of the falling water. Completely showered, it had shutdown by itself and the AC adapter light was orange, which means “charging”. I removed the battery, which looks completely dead (none of its charge LEDs light up when I press its button). I proceeded to take the iBook apart and put it on top of the servers, so that it could dry… I’ll see this evening if it agrees to come back to life, but I have to say I don’t really have much hope.
It was about midnight when we finished. We went to bed and somehow managed to sleep.

This morning Clo wakes me up panicked, telling it’s raining in the bedroom. Hopefully, it was not, as we saw when we turned the light on. But the 15litres bucket in the office was full, and the water, that was still falling from the roof, flooded the entire room, passed under the door, in the hall, and under the door, to the bedroom.

Insert more insanities here…