A Crutch for the Crab

_Becoming the official GNU a2ps maintainer

I've been using GNU a2ps from ancient days. I prefer to print out things prettily and read them on papers (with highlighters at hand) rather than on computer displays. You may safely say I'm a caveman.

Unfortunately, the upstream development of GNU a2ps is basically dead. I know there are some promising replacements (most notably Cedilla), but the problem is, I got used to the good ol' GNU a2ps too much. It still works for me. And to make it worse, I'm a Lisp illiterate (do not throw stones at me, please).

So, I finally took over the official maintainership of GNU a2ps, and now preparing a new maintenance release. No flashy new features (such as the much needed UTF-8 support), but most of easy bugs are fixed. You can obtain the current tarball:

http://people.debian.org/~mhatta/a2ps-4.13c-rc3.tar.gz (I'd like to upload this to alpha.gnu.org, but GNU sysadmins don't give me the needed permission yet).

Or, you might want to obtain it through the anonymous CVS:

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/a2ps co -r a2ps-4-1x a2ps

Note that specifying the tag "a2ps-4-1x" is important.

So, at least you have someone to blame w.r.t. GNU a2ps now. Please give it a try and tell me how you think (Debian packaging is underway). The a2ps mailing list is also revived, it's not yet another spam honeypot anymore. Join there if you want. Or, if you are kind enough, please join the development at Savannah.

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_Restarted English blog

This is my new English blog, built with Blosxom.

I've been writing somewhat official Japanese blog on FLOSS in general at Open Tech Press (the Japanese counterpart of NewsForge) and a personal Japanese blog on everyday life for several years. Actually I tried several times to have a decent English blog, but my laziness always prevents me from keeping blogging in English. Well, maybe this time too...

I basically want this blog as a means of announcing my projects (and training of English writing). I tried to mimic the look & feel of my personal Japanese blog, which uses tDiary, a blog engine very popular in Japan. I wrote up a Blosxom flavour to use the themes for tDiary.

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