Evolution address book TODO

Some suggested improvements to the contacts component in Evolution (somewhat ordered by priority):

• Synchronise with devices and other clients
• Better looking display panes (integrated search and proper context menus)
• Better search UI
• Working LDAP support
• Working GAL support (and maybe groupwise)
• Do something about the slow vCard parsing
• Replace CORBA with DBUS

libebook scalability

Ever had a monster-addressbook in Evolution? During some performance testing of libebook this weekend, I found that it behaves very badly with large addressbooks. A bit of digging revealed the cause - in the way it uses GList. When fetching multiple contacts from the standard file backend, g_list_append is used instead of g_list_prepend, which scales way better. A tiny patch fixes the problem.



The "libdb direct" numbers stem from a routine that bypasses evolution-data-server altogether and connects directly to libdb. Consider that almost the ultimate "time to beat", given the current database format. There is no doubt room for improvement.

All tests are run with a number of equal contacts with only name and email filled in. The database was stored on a tmpfs drive (ramdisk). For those who are interested, to create 1 million contacts take several hours.. I don't think that anyone sane will have tens of thousands of contacts, but for testing purposes, for batch processing and large enterprises, good scalability is a must. The address book has more potential for peformance improvements, but sooner or later the verbose data structure will be the limit.

I'm sure g_list_append is used in a similar way a lot of places around e-d-s and GNOME in general. A quick-win is to replace with g_list_prepend wherever n is large.

April 1st

My first post was probably the worst April's fool ever, but couldn't help it since it happened to be April 1st.. ;)

I expect posts here to cover topics such as Evolution, as I am one of the Debian maintainers, and also Nokia N800 as I'm the happy owner of one.

I got myself a new, shiny N800!

Maybe no surprise as the title of this blog says it all, but I got the super-gadget directly from Belgium February 7. It took only one and a half day from I entered my VISA-number until TNT tried to deliver it in Oslo. TRIED. For some stupid reason, TNT tries to deliver the parcel at home addresses during office hours without prior notice. I'm never at home at that time, and had to call them to redeliver at work after the weekend. I'm not the first one to notice this madness.


The device looks good, but tastes better. Especially the shiny high-res screen is appealing, as many bloggers have pointed out. Size-wise, it's bigger than a Palm PDA and smaller than a normal tablet. It didn't occur to me before that the Palm was designed to fit in a shirt pocket. The N800 does not. It fits in a jacket pocket though. For heavy web browsing it's a bit small and as a music player and PDA, it's a bit big. As a remote control and for GPS navigation, it's just perfect.

It quickly came to me that this device is perfect as a remote control. Yes, you heard me right: remote control. A very expensive one, though. But if you think about it, not that much more expensive than a decent iPod. What you can't do with an iPod is sit comfortably in the sofa with no wires and control the music on the stereo. With mpd and gmpc, you have a jukebox that can be controlled with a rich interface from multiple sources. I'd die to have the latest version of gmpc ported to maemo, though. Anyone?

First post!

This is the first post of a new blog that will feature updates from tractor pulling shows, bunad-fashion, and a weekly review of Bavarian Weißwurst.

Enjoy!