brad has nearly finished his new POP mail server

I've been following with some interest the recent progress of LJ founder brad in his quest to write a new POP mail server. I don't remember his original motivation for the project, but if it's like most of his work, he probably did this because the existing protocol sucks and he wanted to clean it up somehow. (His other motivation is sometimes just purely visionary: like hello, the LJ friends page? RSS feed reader, circa 1999. Brilliant.) At any rate, he appears to have recently wrapped up the bulk of his work on this, although I know from earlier entries that he doesn't really plan to roll out this POP mail server for general use. I think he's actually just planning to use it himself. And probably release the code for anyone else to use, unsupported.

The technospeak is practically unintelligible to me, but I still enjoy reading these posts from him. You can read the post in question here.

Mini-review: Lawrence Block's The Sins Of The Fathers (1976)

Just finished the first Matthew Scudder novel by Lawrence Block and wanted to sing its praises while also offering an excerpt. I was first introduced to Lawrence Block's writing not much more than a year ago, despite the fact that he's one of the main titans of the crime fiction genre and a truly gifted, excellent author. The Scudder character is so immensely real and understandable that he comes right off the page to real life, it seems. I also love reading about Scudder's alcoholism, a trait which I've written about before, wondering aloud if Block has struggled with that problem himself. He certainly writes about it eloquently.

The excerpt I wanted to include today isn't strictly illustrative of the crux of Scudder's character, but it's an interesting look into the character's darker side. In this scene, Scudder has just left the umpteenth bar he's visited that night, and he was letting himself walk "with the special rolling gait that is the special property of drunks and sailors." In a doorway up ahead of him. Scudder became aware of movement, and when a young hood with a knife stepped from the shadows, Scudder "knew [he'd] been looking for him for hours." Circumstances of the case he was working on were getting to him, and he was looking for a fight, I guess.

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