A while ago, the Psi development team switched from Darcs to Subversion for version control, because the Darcs pros (distributed, extremely simple and elegant) did not compensate for the cons any longer (slowness, non-scalability, ‘infinite’ merges, lack of community and tools, …). Our development was pretty central anyway at that time, so we decided that Subversion was good enough. However, we started to miss local commits more than we thought we would, and some of us are working on their own forks, which makes Subversion a suboptimal choice. We are therefore currently trying out Git as a replacement, which should bring us all the good stuff from Darcs, combined with the speed and portability of Subversion. Note that during the experiment, we will not be updating our Subversion branch any more (which will soon cause breakage, since Subversion automatically updates changes to the external Iris repository).

If you’re interested in following our latest developments from our experimental Git tree, simply clone our official repository through the following steps:

git clone git://git.psi-im.org/psi.git
cd psi
git submodule init
git submodule update

To get the latest changes after an initial clone, execute the following commands

git pull
git submodule update

Note that you need Git 1.5 or later in order to be able to do these commands.

If you’re interested in knowing more about using Git, check out Scott Chacon’s excellent Git talk (and accompanying book).

For fans of social networking, we also have a mirror of the official Psi repository on GitHub. And while we’re on the topic of web interfaces: while waiting for an official web interface to our Git repository, you can check out an experimental one here.

According to a recent study by Microsoft into instant messaging habits it takes only six steps to link everyone together.

The research carried out by Microsoft researchers Eric Horvitz and Jure Leskovec studied 30 billion instant messages sent using Microsoft Messenger during June 2006 and found that any two people were linked by seven or fewer acquaintances.

As reported by BBC News, Horvitz says "What we are seeing suggests that there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity."

This research is further evidence of the social and collaborative benefits instant messaging can offer both in and outside of the enterprise through linking more and more people together.

You can get more details on the article from BBC News: Study revives six degrees theory.

It's a bit late for me to be posting this now, but we did recently release Pidgin 2.5.0. There are a few things about this release that I'd like to discuss:

• MSNP15 support
• Custom smiley support
• The Windows and *BSD AIM tooltip crash

Let's hit these in the order I listed them.

MSNP15. Finally, we have a release which includes updated MSN protocol support. We now support the personal message, current media, and offline message features of recent MSN official clients. We do not, however, support fast file transfers. We still support only the MSN-server-proxied transfer method, which while slow is 100% reliable. Quite frankly, file transfer isn't a high priority. If someone wants to implement fast file transfers, feel free to submit patches to us.

Custom smileys. During the development cycle of 2.5.0, a patch was accepted that implemented custom smiley support on MSN and provided a framework within libpurple for other protocols supporting the feature to grow support. There is one issue with this support--we can't save an incoming animated GIF emoticon. This is a limitation in gdkpixbuf, which doesn't support saving the GIF format by default. There are perhaps some additional dependencies we could incur for this, but nothing has been done in this area yet. To set up your custom smileys, go to the "Tools" menu on the Buddy List window and select "Smiley."

AIM Tooltip Crash. We've had a number of duplicated reports of crashes when "mousing over" an AIM buddy. The crash happens when trying to display the tooltip, and only appears when Glib uses its internal vsnprintf() implementation (which happens on some non-glibc systems, such as Windows and the BSD flavors of UNIX). An updated liboscar.dll that fixes this problem is available on ticket #6627. Please don't open any more tickets about this bug!

There is one other AIM bug I'd like to mention, since we're aware it exists. Not too long ago it came to our attention that when a Pidgin user joins an AIM chatroom and tries to send messages, less than 25% of the messages actually make it to the other members of the room. We are aware of the bug, but I believe we're not yet fully certain of the cause. A bug report already exists (#6590), so please don't open any more tickets about this bug either!

Hopefully all you MSN users out there enjoy the new features. It's taken a long time to get the features out there, but I think in the end the wait is worth it.

So I imported my development blog into planet.pidgin.im. Something I've been meaning to do for awhile, but just kept forgetting to do. This blog has been syndicated on planet-im.com for years now, way back when Christian first started it.

Anyways, planet decided it was going to import three of my posts. No big deal right...

Tell that to the "spam victims", one of the posts, sure wasn't really development related, I can somewhat understand that. The other was me annoucing the release of a new project, *I*, a *pidgin developer*, had written. Both of which we're met by "stop spamming planet pidgin". Which I found completely ironic since these posts and more have, as I mentioned earlier, been syndicated on planet-im.com for quite awhile now.

Still, I find it exceedling hilarous what people consider "spam" these days. Apparently a developer's blog, where he blogs about things he's developing and sometimes non-development things to try and get and see responses from a wider audience, isn't filtered down enough. The whole thing reminds me a lot about the on going complaints of pidgin launchpad on our support mailing list as being spam amoung others.

The point I'm trying to get at here, is that when you sign up for a mailing list or read an aggrated feed, that unless you're an admin, you can *NOT* control what gets posted. Ironically, when you complain verbally about supposed spam, all you do is create more "spam".

This spam, that the verbal crowd then creates, of course fills things like our support mailing list with junk that really isn't support related, and thus offtopic making it harder for those looking for a solution in the archives, and last but not least makes us, the developers/admin look insensitive, when if the verbal people just ignored the "spam" in the first place we'd all be better off.

You’ll already have read, or be about to read, similar blog posts from Remko and Peter, I imagine, here’s my take:

Remko Tronçon, Peter Saint-Andre and I are writing a book on XMPP for O’Reilly, with a working title of “XMPP: The Definitive Guide”, expected to hit the shelves (and hopefully fly off them soon after) early 2009.

If you’re wondering how things like this come about, the story goes something like this:

Every so often, someone comes into the Jabber Development room, and asks if there’s any getting started documentation, or they ask if there’s a decent book, or they ask if there’s a guide to what Jabber/XMPP can do for them as a developer. For some reason, it seems to usually be me that ends up letting them know that there isn’t really, unless you want to go and read the RFCs, or the XEPs. I got the daft idea that writing such a book would be helpful, so I poked Remko and asked if he was interested in co-authoring something if O’Reilly would publish it - he was, so off we went and did very little for quite a while. As it happens, O’Reilly were interested in publishing a book about XMPP; realising an XMPP book wasn’t an XMPP book without Peter, we set about persuading him that joining us in the venture was a Smart Thing™, and things started moving.

We met up for a pizza at FOSDEM in February, hashed out where we wanted to go with the book, wrote out the overview, sent it off to O’Reilly, who didn’t hate it, and started writing.

Since then, we’ve made some decent progress on it, and also found out that writing books is hard work (even given that each of us has written at least either a doctoral thesis or RFCs). Still, we’re chugging along and things should be really taking shape in the next month or two
The rest will, someday, be history — we’ll post an update later when we’re closer to the inevitable fame and fortune.

I’m excited to announce that Peter, Kevin, and I recently got the green light from O’Reilly to start writing a book about Jabber/XMPP. The book will be targeted at a diverse public: on one hand, people who want to get acquainted with XMPP and will get an introduction and a general overview of XMPP, its workings, and its possibilities. On the other hand,  software engineers who want to integrate XMPP into their products will get a guide to implementing different use cases of XMPP through a series of different developer stories. The book is expected to be available in 2009, so start making some room on your bookshelf!

It's been brought up by certain people, that they "know" how pidgin developers use monotone, and that monotone is an inferrior tool. Thus I decided to take the time to document how *I* use monotone. Keep in mind, I use monotone for everything nowadays. The only time I use a different (D)VCS is when I'm working on a project that I didn't start.

At any rate, I'd be extremely curious to see the usage/flow of the same actions (working on an existing branch, branching a branch, starting a new project/branch, working on a new (to you) project/branch, merging branches, and serving a new project/branch) in other (D)VCS's as well.

Below is the fruit for said labor (click it for the full sized version, it's about 400KB though...). The digrams were created with dot from the graphviz package. The source of the diagrams can be found over here.

Ok, so Dirk surprised us all and upgraded Bugzilla to the new 3.0.5 version. There have been some growing pains associated due to the conversion. There’s more info on dirk’s blog about the reasons behind the quick conversion. All in all though, can’t say that it went too bad.

We’ll be continuing to improve things as the next couple of weeks go by, and you can always file requests on bugs.kde.org.

Over the next few days, I’ll be blogging about some of the additional features that the 3.0.5 version of bugzilla has over the ancient 2.16.1 version we were using, so stay tuned.

Sound Juicer "I Don't Know What You Heard But It's Mandatory" 2.23.2 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Lots of fixes from the Amazing Matthew Martin:

• Stop playback when the disc is re-read (Matthew Martin)
• Only eject the disc if tracks were ripped (MM)
• Don't try and move the non-existant temp file when skipping (MM)
• Free the option context (Pierre Benz)
• Don't block until n-c-b quits when copying discs
• Fix playback track switching (MM)

Roadmap

With the upcoming release of Django 1.0 in the next few weeks, we decided it was time to formalize a roadmap for Review Board 1.0. The roadmap provides a good overview of what users can expect for our release, and what it will take to get there.

At this point we’re asking for people to contribute wherever possible. The big thing is fixing bugs targeted for the 1.0 release. We’d also like some help in finalizing unit tests.

Quality Control

We’re doing what we can to improve quality control in Review Board. For a lot of people, Review Board works great, though setups often differ and some users hit issues that others never see. For this, we’re trying to improve our unit tests to catch these various cases. When people submit patches, we’d greatly appreciate unit tests to cover the new code, and in some cases will require them for the code submission.

Selenium

We will soon start using Selenium in our unit test process to simulate user action in various web browsers. Selenium allows for remote-controlling a web browser, simulating clicks, text input, and other user actions and checking the results. Over time, when our Selenium test suite is more complete, we should be able to catch browser-specific problems a lot more easily.

Buildbot Server

Another issue users have hit lately is breakages due to changes in Django for the 1.0 release. As things calm down there, this will become less of an issue, but we’ve put things in place to catch these problems before users do.

We have just set up a buildbot server that will perform a full build and run the test suite whenever there’s a code check-in to Review Board, Django, Djblets or Django-Evolution. It will then notify us when there’s a new breakage. Users can check the build page before updating just to make sure they won’t hit a major problem. Later on, our buildbot server will generate nightly builds and handle Selenium tests.

We have a limited number of servers to test with. If you have server space and resources to donate and would like to run a BuildBot Slave server, let me know. We’re looking to set up slaves to test various combinations of the following:

• Python 2.5
• Python 2.4
• Django SVN trunk
• Django 1.0
• Windows 2000, XP and Vista
• Internet Explorer 6 and 7 (for Selenium tests)
• Opera (for Selenium tests)
• Firefox 2 and 3 (for Selenium tests)

Sandbox

Our BuildBot server is also set up to allow us to test code changes before we submit the code. Running a sandbox build of our pending code will cause all build slaves to run the entire test suite. This ensures that we don’t break things accidentally.

If you’re a contributor working on large patches for Review Board and would like to have access to the sandbox, please post to the mailing list and we can work with you on getting an account set up.

Installation Improvements

We’re working to make the installation experience much easier. I’m in the process of creating Python easy_install packages for Review Board and Djblets. Soon, users will be able to simply easy_install ReviewBoard to get going instead of checking out the development tree. I’m hoping to create both nightly builds and release builds.

Code will soon go in to move the entire project configuration into the administration interface. Modifying settings_local.py and restarting the server will be a thing of the past. All that will be left there will be a few site-specific settings and the database settings. Expect this to go in real soon.

A tool is in development for helping to generate the initial Review Board server tree based on an installed reviewboard Python module (using easy_install) and generating the web server configuration files. This will hopefully take care of a lot of problems people hit when trying to get their server configuration right the first time.

And last but not least, before 1.0 we will have a first-time installation page that handles the creation of the initial settings_local.py and the adding and checking of repositories.

So in the end, the installation process will be something along the lines of:

1. sudo easy_install ReviewBoard
2. sudo rb-install-site /var/www/reviews.mycompany.com
3. Fill out the fields presented.
4. Hand-tweak the configuration files if needed.
5. Go to the page for the new Review Board server, fill out the fields and finish the install.

This is the goal, anyway. We’re going to try to get as close to this as possible for 1.0.

Donations

Review Board has become a full-time project for us. Though it got its start at VMware, it’s really a personal project developed in our spare time, not a project run by VMware. As the project grows, we’ve been putting more time, energy and money into it.

Hosting fees have started to become large, given that we’re now hosting the main project website, the main Review Board server for our code reviews, the demo server, the Google Summer of Code review server and the BuildBot server and slaves. Down the road, we have many plans that will also require funding.

To help cover our costs, we’re now made it easy to donate to the project. If Review Board has helped you, your company, team, or project and saved you money or time over alternative solutions, maybe you’d like to help give back to keep our project going. Every bit helps.

I've been using a web-based email program called Open WebMail for the past 7 or 8 years (from back when it used to be called NeoMail). But my spam flagging attempts have become increasingly less effective, and Open WebMail isn't AJAXy (which makes it slower to use), and Google Mail is pretty fantastic.

So I signed kingant.net up for a Google Apps account. I'm pretty happy with it. I imported all my mail from the past 8 or so years. It takes up 995MB (14%) of the max of 7035MB.

So far it's been reasonably reliable. There was maybe an 18 hour period around August 8th where it was down and I couldn't log in at all. But I'm hoping that was a freak occurrence.

And the spam filtering is pretty good. I still get 1 or 2 spam emails a day that aren't flagged, but that's better than the 10 or 20 I was getting before. I get about 11,000 spam emails per month. That's about one every four minutes.

After considerable sweeping of our bug tracker, here's the compiled list of features targeted at the next minor release. It's mostly about small/incremental improvements in usability. If you know of small fixes which would yield equally significant usability improvements, feel free to file a bug.

I haven't posted in a while, so I figured it would be a good time to give some updates. Growl 1.1.x development is winding down, and we're looking towards 1.2.

To start off, we have a new Lead Developer, Peter Hosey. Peter has been instrumental in the past in getting a lot of stuff done (along with other Developers), and just has a general understanding of the project, the codebase, and things involved with working on an open source project. He's an all around good guy and I'm glad he accepted the Lead Developer spot.

On to 1.2 stuff. We're basically going to be trying to take the stance of smaller feature sets make for faster releases. One thing we're probably going to have in 1.2 is GrowlTunesPlugin. This will replace GrowlTunes. Basically it's a plugin for iTunes, which does what GrowlTunes does now, and a few more fun things.

Another major thing we're looking forward to is the new TCP communications protocol. Basically we're going to be deprecating the old protocol at some point, and make this work. The end goal is to have a single protocol for cocoa, carbon, and networking. The spec is being worked on now, and there is a discussion going on right now in order to hammer everything out so that it works all cross platformy as well. We're even working to make it so that Adobe AIR can work with it, which would be a Good Thing.

As to 2.0 and beyond, Austin Sarner made a nice set of mockups that I think solve a lot of problems. However, we need Developers to help with this. Here's what it looks like (click the images to see them bigger):

Applications

General

Displays

Networking

About

If all of this looks interesting to you, we could use your help.

I moved development resources from the current mix of darcs repository, Trac wiki and Drupal wiki to GitHub. Say hello to the new SamePlace wiki and the source browser.

Hopefully this will make getting into the project much easier, whether at the extension writer level, core developer, doc writer or tester. Enjoy! :-)

Have you ever wished that you could chat with your family and friends in your native language? Sometimes there's just no substitute for expressing a thought in your own language. Google Talk now has transliteration bots that will convert text from English to Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil or Telugu. Think of a bot as an invited guest to your chat session that will transliterate what you type in English to the right local script. For those who are not familiar with transliteration, it is a service provided by Google India that allows you to type in Indian languages using phonetically equivalent English script (it is also available on our labs page, orkut scraps and blogger). If you're chatting in Hindi, when you type 'haal kaisa hai janab ka?' the en2hi.translit@bot.talk.google.com bot will reply in Hindi as 'हाल कैसा है जनाब का?'

There are currently 5 transliteration bots - Hindi (en2hi.translit), Kannada (en2kn.translit), Malayalam (en2ml.translit), Tamil (en2ta.translit) and Telugu (en2te.translit), and remember that their names end with "@bot.talk.google.com". To use one of these bots follow these three steps:

1) First add the bot that you want to your friend's list. (For example, add en2hi.translit@bot.talk.google.com for Hindi). You just need to do this once.
2) Start a chat session with your friend
3) Convert the chat session to a group chat and invite the bot to it.



तो शुरू हो जाइए...

A few days ago I have silently uploaded tigase-livecd-4.0.0.iso file into our download section. Even there was no announcement the download counter shows now 145. I wonder if there was such a big number if people knew what they are downloading....

Anyway. This ISO file is the first release of the Tigase LiveCD version. It is a complete environment runnable from the CD with pre-configured Tigase server, Drupal CMS (Blog and Forums) and Dovecot - IMAP4 server integrated together. The Drupal CMS runs with the Minichat on the example website. The live CD is based on the Gentoo Linux.

In this particular case integration means all services (Tigase, Drupal, Email) use user accounts from a single database. The user account management is done via Drupal website.

You can also post short news on the website directly from your XMPP client, you will also receive notifications about comments and posts on the website to your XMPP client.

The live CD contains also 2 nice XMPP clients: Psi and Coccinella in the most recent versions. Hm, Psi has just increased version number so it is not the most recent.

Everything installed and pre-configured, starting up automatically when the system boots from the CD.

read more

This is a long drawn out post about my experience with trying to get things you really want for the WII. If the WII or the lack of ability of the WII and it's games don't interest you, I suggest you skip this post :) I'm posting this mostly as just a record of the absurtity that Nintendo lack of supply presents to the general consumer.

So back in Feburary, I won a WII on ebay. Paid a bit more for it (about 350 USD after shipping), mainly because I was tired of calling around and looking for one.

Now fast forward two months and Mario Kart WII is released. I've always been a big Mario Kart fan, since the SNES, and I've owned every version, including Double Dash which I just happened to finally buy. So anyways, I see it in stores, and go "meh, I'll grab it later".

Fast forward four more months and I can't find Mario Kart WII anywhere. Calling stores like made, watching ebay, watching craigs list, etc.

Sunday night, I place a bid on a new copy on ebay. At the same time, I search through craigs list and find a used copy. I end up winning the copy on ebay (for way more than it's worth, especially since it had a tricky title and descripion). I tell the guy on craigs list I'm going with the one on ebay since I have to. Also the one on craigs list is used.

I then decide I should go and pick up some of the necessities, two more wiimotes and four wii wheels. I end up hitting target since bestbuy is already closed. Target doesn't have any of the official wii wheels, but they do have the wiimotes. Score. I return home with half the job done and decide to persue the rest on monday on my way home from work.

So here's where the real fun begins...

grim&aposs quest for four wii wheels

So I leave from work (A) at about 4:00PM.

I head to the nearest bestbuy (B). What do you know, they have Mario Kart WII. I say screw it, I've been trying like hell to find this, I found it, I'm getting it. The one I have coming from ebay with either go back up on ebay or be a present to my niece. Unfortunately, this bestbuy doesn't have any official wii wheels.

Current progress: 1 copy of Mario Kart WII, 4 wiimotes, 1 WII Wheel.

Theres a Game Stop close (C), so I head there. Guess what, no official WII Wheels. An employee (who is/was by far the most helpful Game Stop employee I've ever dealt with), offers to call a nearby EB Games and see if they have any. They have one, they're going to hold it. Awesome.

Current progress: 1 copy of Mario Kart WII, 4 wiimotes, 1 WII Wheel.

So I head to EB Games (D). Pick up the WII Wheel. Score.

Current progress: 1 copy of Mario Kart WII, 4 wiimotes, 2 WII Wheels.

Since I'm right by a mall which has another Game Stop (E), I decide to head there. They as well, have one WII Wheel. Grab it.

Current progress: 1 copy of Mario Kart WII, 4 wiimotes, 3 WII Wheels.

I decide that I can't go home when all I need is one more WII Wheel, so I head to the next closest Best Buy (F). What do you know, they're useless and don't have any.

Current progress: 1 copy of Mario Kart WII, 4 wiimotes, 3 WII Wheels.

Since I'm right by another mall which has another Game Stop (G), I decided to head there. Get inside, find the WII accessories, shit they have three on the damn shelf. It's a locking hook, so I ask the guy at the counter for one, and he sends another guy to get one out of the back. So I get my fourth WII Wheel and head home.

Current progress: 1 copy of Mario Kart WII, 4 wiimotes, 4 WII Wheels.

I finally get home around 6:00PM. Tear everything open and finally get to enjoy the damn game.

So what have we learned here? For some reason, Nintendo seems to have a *VERY* difficult time meeting demand. For the consoles I can understand, something can go wrong in production of a chip, pcb, etc. But a game disc?! Come on, it's freaking pressed, they should be chruning the games out. I mean the wheel could take some time to produce, but think about it, it's plastic that is created from a mold...

Anyways, long story short, back order WII stuff online and be patient, or waste time (about 2 hours), gas (about a gallon or so, gotta love good gas milleage), and extra money (I still have a over paid copy coming from ebay) by being impatient.

If you have not seen this yet, you really need to check it out. Or even give it a try. ;)

http://www.youtube.com/video_response_view_all?v=3YAIVQ_oh88

Gumball 3000 is a yearly multi-day car driving event founded by Maximillion Cooper. It was inspired by an actual race across the country and some movies with a similar theme in the 1970s and 1980s (Cannonball and The Cannonball Run).

It's officially not a "race" because that would be, well, illegal. The entry fee is $120,000 and participants tend to be rich people from around the world, which means they drive crazy awesome cars (countless Ferrari's (including an Enzo), Lamborghini's, Porsche's, a Bugatti Veyron). I think it's a money-making business for Maximillion... he organizes a bunch of famous people (this year David Hasselhoff and Alfonso Ribeiro) and fast cars to drive long distances in a few days, then sells advertising and merchandise. It's really a brand.

Anyhoo, this year's race started on Saturday and the first leg was from San Francisco to Los Angeles. But we weren't aware of that. Melanie and Martin and Ben and Emily and I were eating at IHOP in Redwood City. On the way back we were driving on 101 and saw a few cars drive past us with lots of "Gumball 3000" stickers. The first car we saw was like a Subaru Impreza or something, so I figured they were just trying to look cool by putting a sticker on their car. But then we saw a few more cars including a Lamborghini (Murcielago I think?).

There are tons of pictures on Flickr.