I am a proud pirate
Today I have decided to join the Pirate Party of Sweden and I intend to vote pirate in the upcoming elections to the European Parliament. The Pirate Party is a political party that explictly limits is policy opininons to issues of internet regulation, intellecual property, file sharing and surveilance.
I intend to vote pirate despite the fact that I have opinions in any other areas of policy primarily for two reasons. Firstly, I think that those issues are critically important and are not properly addressed or even understood by any other of the major political parties in Sweden. Secondly, I am frustrated by the current political parties inability to provide voting alternatives for people like me who value the classical liberal values of individual freedom and rights. I'd love to vote for a truly liberal party that would credibly promise not to sacrifice privacy and individual liberties and be the enablers of truly horrible pieces of legislation such as the FRA law. However, in the current situation there is no such party that even comes close to have a chance to get representation.
So, without further ado I now pronounce myself a member of the Pirate Party and I encourage every swedish voter to vote pirate on June 7th.
Filed under Politics | Comments (5)Introducing rjmailer
Today I have decided that it is time to publish rjmailer, a programming project that 
I have worked with on spare time for the last two years or so. In my own view, rjmailer is the most useful piece of software I have written yet, and I have some faith that in time others will find it useful as well. Thanks to my amazing partner Alex, it even has it's own mascot and webpage to go with the release. I love you man!
rjmailer is a programming library that sends mail. There are some other pieces of software that does that, but they usually hand off their messages to the mail system and don't give much feedback to the user. rjmailer is not like that. It goes out of it's way to provide as much information as possible about the mail delivery and can in many cases give detailed and quick information about failures such as misspelled usernames or domain names.
Lets say you run a web based service that require people to register with some email address. You want to verify that the address is valid, so you send an email to the address that the user provided when signing up and require her to click a link in that message to activate your account. We're all used to this, but there are lots of things that can go wrong. The user can misspell her email address, or there can be some problem with her email server that causes the activation message to bounce. If you are unlucky you lose a member or even someone that can later be converted to a paying customer.
If that sounds interesting, please have a look at rjmailer.org. However, please be warned: this is beta software. It is not yet fully tested, has bugs and will probably lose your mail for the moment.
Filed under rjmailer | Comment (1)