I've been quiet for a bit.  Most of you know how blogging goes ... you get excited about it or have a lot to talk about for a time, and then you start doing less and less posting.  Though some of you are quite adept at regularly posting ... to you I give the virtual thumbs up.  =)  But what have I been up recently?  Quite a bit actually.

For those who don't know, I left my university job of 11 years at the end of October and joined Jive Software.  My work with Jive fell right in line with "what I really want to do" for my career.  =)  Plus, they're all really great people.  That said, I'm working from across the country (waves) and quite enjoying it.  Maybe Jive will open up a Raleigh-Durham (Research Triangle Park?) office at some point.  ;D ;D ;D  Anyway.  I have continued my IM Gateway work, become one of the primary developers of Openfire, and become the lead developer of Spark (amongst other things).  I've been enjoying all of these things quite a bit!  I don't get to spend a lot of time on Spark, but when I do, it's quite fun to be playing with the client side again.  It's been a loooong time.  At this point I get to play with all three of the main areas of XMPP (Client, Server, and Component)!  It didn't take that long to adapt to Jive's environment though.  I actually really dig more deadlines and scheduled releases and such.  Frankly, it helps me mind "pick a target" when I'm trying to decide what to work on next.

So what's happened to PyICQt and PyAIMt?  I've officially stepped aside.  I moved them to Google Code so that others can more easily become involved.  You can now find them at:

http://code.google.com/p/pyaimt/

and

http://code.google.com/p/pyicqt/

I haven't removed myself as one of the "owners" yet on there so that it's possible for me to facilitate others becoming involved in the project for the next month or so in case others have been dying to get involved and didn't think about approaching me before.  A couple of other folk have stepped up and are doing a few things with it!  Yay!   The new location of the py-transports "mailing list" is now a Google Group at http://groups.google.com/group/py-transports.  I must admit, at this point, I don't miss them.  I do hope that they keep going though as I do believe they are good projects.

What about the XMPP Script Repository?  Well, I moved that to SourceForge: http://xmppscriptrepo.sf.net/

I won't be actively managing it, but if you are interested in becoming involved with it, please ping me and I'll set you up!  (let me know what your sourceforge id is)  It's using a SourceForge tracker to handle new script submissions.  If people -do- submit things to it, that would be about the most maintenance it needs unless you really feel like doing some significant work with it.  So... lemme know!

So what's left of BlatherSource?  You're "looking at it".  All I'm using BlatherSource for at this point is my blog.  I may do something else with it at some point, but for now it's just my blog.  I did like the interface I had put together for it, but I just don't have time to keep developing it/to manage it, ya know?  Many kudos to my hosts at Modevia.com for putting up with my requests for the site.  =)

I do still have a site for JWGC, http://jwgc.sf.net/ (moved it to SourceForge).  No idea if I'll ever do much else with it, but I like to keep it around.  It's my first XMPP related project ever.  =)

So... why did I move PyAIMt and PyICQt to Google Code instead of SourceForge?  Well, mostly because I wanted a wiki for the documentation and I couldn't find one on SourceForge.  Of course, an hour after moving everything I found that SourceForge -does- have a wiki.  Color me blind...  Doesn't matter, was neat to see what Google Code offers in terms of services.  I really like their "easy on the end user" issues tracker.  I don't like their web space offering though.  Spaces I think it is?  Whatever it is I don't like it.  I couldn't do with it anything like what I wanted.  I hear they are looking into a better solution at some point, so that might be cool.

After looking around relentlessly or a Java OTR library .. something like libotr that Pidgin uses, I decided to request a project on SourceForge to write my own.  Hopefully others will find use in it.  It's not approved yet, but if it is, it'll be jotr.  (http://sourceforge.net/projects/jotr ?)  If anyone is interesting in helping me out with that, I would greatly appreciate it!  I was rather surprised to see nothing already exists for Java for OTR.  (then again, I could have just not found it, but I tried really hard to find it  ;D  )

The IM Gateway plugin ended up putting me in the lead developer role of Java-JML (http://java-jml.sf.net) (MSN messenger library for Java) and also a developer of Martyr (http://martyr.sf.net/) (IRC library for Java).  Things sure do pile up quick, don't they?  =)  Those have been fun though.  I've gotten to work with Smack a little more as well in my Jive work, so that's been cool.  At this point I feel like I'm touching just about everything!  lol  Who knew that I'd go from being irritated with Java to enjoying working with it so much.

Anyway, so that's what my life has been lately!  New job, new adventures, letting go of some of the old ... moving forward.  =)  Yes, I do still have some XEPs to write/propose on the backburner.  I just haven't gotten to the point where I need to write them.

Well, I think I'm finally getting over whatever sickness it is that I've had for the past week... I hope.  Not very condusive to working on things...  That said, a lot of developments have come up recently that I thought I would post about.  Fair warning, this is gonna be kinda random.  =)

PEP Improvements

I would just like to throw a shout out to the folk who have been working on PEP.  I love the latest bit of changes and believe they will make it soooo much easier to implement.  Woot!

Familiar on my Pocket PC

As per some advice from a previous post, I have been looking into getting Familiar and it's associated desktops on my Pocket PC (IPAQ 2200).  Lovely hardware.  Crappy software.  (Pocket PC OS.. think it's even of the Windows CE vintage)  Anyway, I soon found there are two main choices for desktops for Familiar, GPE and OPIE.  First off, I adore the IPAQ's serial console and also the Familiar bootloader (forget it's name) and Familiar itself.  There's something just neat about watching Linux booting on your little handheld device.  Now, I right now my IPAQ has stuff for installing Familiar 0.8.3 (I think?) with GPE, and a beta Familiar 0.8.4 (I think?) with GPE or OPIE.  0.8.3 works fairly well except that I don't particularly care for the GPE desktop environment.  I think it's a tad silly to deal with getting root and that sort of thing on a handheld device.  Likewise, some of the apps aren't particularly helpful/nice.  For example, I can't get either wireless card I have to work.  One SDIO, and one CompactFlash/PC Card/I'm not sure.  lol  No worries on the lack of support for them yet, but the weird thing is that when I go to the webbrowser, and type in a url, it does .. well like nothing.  No error message, no nothing.  I goes back to the main webbrowser window.  Nothing is particularly pretty.  Overall, it just feels like it's trying to be too Linux.  =)  Now OPIE, on the other hand, is gorgeous, acts like a handheld device "ought to", and is generally quite nice!  No love on the wireless card yet still, which is odd, but I'll get to that in a moment.  I'm very excited about getting OPIE on there in a functional manner.  Problem is, it's not real functional under Familiar 0.8.4whatever.  All known bugs according to their trackers, so no worries there, I'm sure things will be fine.  =)  Very much looking forward to full functionality!  As for the wireless cards, looks like there's no support for SDIO cards period.  So ignoring that, the compact flash wireless card...  the online docs say something about what driver I would need to use, but said driver isn't selectable.  Soo.... yeah.  Maybe that's a pending release of the OS type thing.  Either way, that'll be mega cool to have when things are ironed out.  I'll be keeping an eye on things.

Nokia 770

Well, I am finally the proud owner of a Nokia 770.  I went and purchased one on Friday.  Comp USA... I would just like to say that your inventory control system is "the crap".  While it isn't ideal, I don't like that your web site says that there's no copies of it in stock and yet the store actually has some.  HOWEVER, how in the hell is it that I call you and you say you don't have any in stock and yet we drive over there, the guy in the handhelds department turns around, looks it up in the computer, and sees one available.  ???  Are you all's computers not tied together or what?  Bah.  Anyway, the nice guy found it hiding in a cabinet and low and behold, it's mine.  I immediately upgraded to the latest OS.  I love that it's self-sufficient!  I don't have to tie it to a desktop to install things, or get it working, or anything.  It's wireless functionality rocks.  Hell it picks up devices around that I didn't know existed.  =D  It cheerfully ties to my phone for access.  Unnnnfortunately, our friends at Sprint have dinked over the LG PM-325 firmware in a way that makes it unable to behave properly as a modem.  It keeps connecting and then disconnecting after like 20 seconds or so.  There's a lot of nice bluetooth functionality in my phone that doesn't work with Sprint's own firmware on there.  I made the mistake of evaluating the phone based off LGs specs, not Sprint's implementation of it.  Bah.  Not much I can do about it.  Sprint doesn't even sell my phone anymore so...  yeah.  As a phone, I love it though.  Oh well on that front.  Anyway, it ties into my home network really well.  Amusingly enough, my friend who bought a 770 a couple of months ago's hardware address is exactly one less than mine.  =)  I've only had a few problems with opera so far.  But those are pretty much classic Opera-isms.  I found the wonder that is the application manager that ties into various repositories.  Installed lots of things to try out.  Gaim actually works quite well!  Well so does google talk.  ;D  I like it quite a bit.  It integrates with the feel of the platform quite well!  I've had a couple of odd crashes here and there, but it comes back pretty cheerfully from the crashes, so no big deal.  I've been experimenting with the PIM software that's GPE based.  Now, considering my feelings on GPE above, I wasn't expecting a lot, but for some reason, on the Nokia 770, it's all quite nice!  Weird.  I haven't investigated whether it can do syncml or anything along those lines.  It has a note pad.  It has a password manager that I was able to download.  .. it's possible that this could be replacing my palm.  I'm thinking about experimenting with it as a replacement next week to see how things flow.  If nothing else, it makes an awesome ... well what it is.  =)  An Internet Tablet.  I enabled swap on the RS MMC card that came with it and that works out well.  Yeah you notice the slowness when it starts hitting swap but ... well what else is new.  =)

Wildfire Gateway Plugin

A little while ago, Jive Software approached me about writing a java based plugin to Wildfire that would provide easy access to other IM protocols.  At first I didn't think I had time for that, but as it turns out, for the most part, people have already written good libraries for the protocols under Java.  Not quite so under Python.  ;D  Besides that, they offered to support the project a tad, and so I have been working on the plugin since.  In this case, it is a single plugin that provides access to AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo.  (IRC planned as well)  It's sorta functional in it's current state.  There's a couple of problems, and a couple of important lacks-of-functionality, but it's definitely coming right along.  The guys from Jive have been very helpful and I'm quite excited about it.  I'm hoping to have good solid base functionality soonish and a beta release.  I have some awesome testers helping find bugs.  There's a lot of things I'm able to do with the plugin that I'm "jealous" of with the python transports.  For example, being able to interact with the user's roster directly is awesome.  I don't have to store a copy of their buddy list, or worry about bombarding the user with a bunch of subscription requests, or worry about lack of support for group propagation, or lack of support for nickname propagation ...  overall it's just really nice to work with internals for this.  Does this mean I'm not touching my python transports anymore?  Not at all.  This plugin will only work with Wildfire and the python transports should work with everything.  Likewise, with the plugin I'm aiming to keep "fairly minimal" whereas with PyAIMt and PyICQt have very intensive support.  For example, with the plugin I'm not implementing 8 billion versions of how avatars are implemented.  =)  Anyway, stay tuned if you are interested.  On a very very bright note, my reward for doing this should be arriving on Monday and it will singlehandedly increase the speed at which I can develop all of my projects.  =)  Score!

I'm using quite a few nifty toolkits with the plugin.  JMML for MSN support.  JYMSG for Yahoo support.  JOSCAR for AIM/ICQ support.  I am forgetting the name of the IRC toolkit I was looking at, but there is one out there.  A lot of these are considered "not yet 1.0", but they appear to work fairly well.  JMML is used with the planetamessenger.org stuff, which seem rather cool.  JYMSG seems to be a tad stagnant, but works well.  JOSCAR is actively being developed as part of Adium X and a 1.0 is right around the corner.  There is a companion piece called oscar.jar, which I may switch to when it's released.  Why?  Well, it's much higher level than joscar, which matters less to me since I am quite familiar with the OSCAR protocol, but would benefit others who might be helping with the code.  I'd like to try to keep this as non-complex as possible.  IRC is going to be interesting.  As we all know, IRC is primarily chatroom type stuff.  I don't have any chatroom stuff written up for the plugin right now, but that's ok.

It's interested to see this implemented via java instead of python.  One of the things about the python transports is that I am having to implement the oscar protocol as I go.  With this, it's already there.  One thing I'm pretty excited about is being able to use this to help with the python transports.  I'll have two gateway-implemented interfaces with AIM/ICQ and I'll be able to watch the flow of things as they go through Wildfire and compare/contrast.

You know, I hadn't given Java much of a chance in the past.  It's quite nifty.  It seems a lot better than it was the last couple times I looked at it.  Perhaps Sun has had quite a good effect on it?  If so, go Sun.  =)  Having the guidance from the folk at Jive to get me started here and there has been wonderful as well.

Anyway, you can keep an eye on what I'm doing here if you are interested:

Gateway Plugin Repository

Blathersource

Man...  yeah.  I feel overwhelmed with the stupid crappy spammers, but I really need to fix things so I can stop them from bothering my site.  Perhaps I will do that tonight 'real quick like'.  I need to implement a couple of things to do it:

1. Add "either captchas or login" for posting anything.

2. Add ability to delete comments

3. Add ability to delete bug reports/feature requests

Hate.

It appears that the world of spam has found my BlatherSource site.  I have begun getting comment spam.  Unless someone has other suggestions, this means I need to either implement:

A. Must register to leave comments (booooo)

B. Captcha's (meh, sure.. why not)

I'm open for suggestions.  I had to enable some extra logic in my blog as well because I was getting traceback spam.  Don't these people have homes?  Bah..

Ah plans don't always come out as they seem, do they?  I think I'm going to vow to stop giving any sort of time frame on anything I do.  Life often defeats timeframes.  In a lot of cases, the conflicting life = work.    No matter, just I need to learn to stop saying "I'll probably have this out by Monday".

That said, the new ScriptRepo is not done.  I have, however, put up a link to the old script repo stuff at the new site (http://scriptrepo.blathersource.org) for folk to get access to in the mean time.  Hopefully I'll get some time to work on it here soon.  I'm quite excited about it.  =)

So I've gotten a lot of questions as to what ScriptRepo is.  Much to my surprise, not many knew of it.  What it is is a repository of various scripts that folk have written that relate to Jabber.  This includes init scripts for various servers, monitoring scripts, migration scripts from one jabber server to another, all kinds of things.  Often folk write wonderfully helpful shell scripts and such and wouldn't really justify creating an entire project somewhere to house it, so this fills that need.

The new site will basically allow folk to upload their own scripts and update them on the fly as they see fit.  I'm thinking about incorporating some sort of tutorials and such 'amongst the scripts'.  For example, there might not be a script to migrate from, say, jabberd2 to ejabberd.  However, there might be a script to migrate from jabberd2 to jabberd1, and then another to migrate from jabberd1 to ejabberd.  So I wanted to incorporate some way to show stuff like that amongst the scripts so you only really have one place to look.

I will have scriptrepo moved to blathersource today.  The new location will be http://scriptrepo.blathersource.org/.  It's dead on jabberstudio, and you know what, I don't really care.  It just means I'm moving the site quicker than I expected.  I'll post something on the various lists once it's moved and ready.

Well, I have switched to a 'managed install' of serendipity.  This is a service provided by Modevia (my hosts for blathersource.org) that means I don't have to maintain -yet another- piece of software.  ;D  (by maintain I mean, watch for updates, and that sort of thing)  That said, I am going to create a theme for serendipity that makes it look like the rest of the blathersource site.

That said, I added a new navigation bar to all of the related sites and am working on adding a forum component.  While I do like the informalness of a mailing list from time to time, I also like to pose questions periodically and a forum seems like a better place to do that.  Primarily, if I pose something on the mailing list, new people joining the list miss it, and on top of that, I and others forget it (ie, it gets lost in their inbox).  So I think this'll be nifty.  I decided to go with Unclassified NewsBoard.  I like the layout and that it has built-in jabber support.  Theming it isn't entirely intuitive, but that's ok, I've got it.  I just need to tweak a few fonts and integrate the authentication mechanisms with blathersource proper and I'll be done.

Going to tweak a few things in blathercore.  Want to go ahead and get jabber notifications working.  Get that rolling and at least tested out.  Still need to get around to letting OTHER people get notified of changes.  =D

I like the idea of having a poll on this site, but the poller doesn't appear to be well behaved yet.  I'm going to have to poke at it's code a bit I guess.  I might take it down if it doesn't look like an easy fix.  It's not a very...how shall we say... robust implementation.  =)