You know, when you are working by yourself on an open source project, your schedule is your own.  If you decide you don't want to work on it for a couple of months, that's your perogative.  At some level there's no rules what-so-ever aside from not doing things that will drive folk away from being interested in your project (assuming you care).  One of the biggest things that drives the project, however, is what -you- want.  When you are working on an open source project where you are teamed up with others, there's some checks and balances over what you do and your partners do.  However, at the end of the day, it's the same type of situation, you all decide what the focus of the project will be.  I don't like to put it like this, but no one has a "right" to your time except for you.

When you start working with a company on an open source projects, things change.  There are deadlines that the company is pushing for help drive your own timeline.  There are things they'd like to see happen that you may or may not agree with.  Instead of saying "well unless you submit a patch, it's not happening", you tend to work something out instead.  It's an interesting adjustment to "normal open source projects".

Do I dislike either?  No.  In fact I've quite enjoyed the experience of it.  It's taught me a few things that I wasn't aware of.  Like I was rather blind to some of the requirements that corporations ask for.  Some of the things they ask for I would typically have thought "that's ridiculous" with some of my other projects, but here I see a lot of folk bringing the same issue up and I start to discover that the issue is more commonplace than I would have assumed.  I'm not citing any examples here.  Just suffice to say there's things that having a broader knowledge of the corporate world has made me reconsider some of the decisions I might have made with other projects in the past.

So many thanks to Jive Software for giving me this additional experience that I wouldn't have gotten probably with PyAIMt and PyICQt.  =)  It's been fun and I hope it continues to be fun!

Why do I often find it so hard to clean up my roster?  Just about anyone who has ever talked to me sits on my roster forever and I typically only end up talking to them for one or two sessions and that's it.  What do I need them on my roster for?  It's just causing my server extra work every time I log in!

So anyway, I spent a good couple of hours here cleaning up my roster and now it's nice and small.  I'm not entirely pleased with Adium X's roster deletion handling because just about every time I deleted a roster item, it reappeared and I had to delete it again.  =/  That said, it's a beta, so what do I expect.  =)

Logging in is now lightning fast.  I know some folk take offense at being removed from a roster, but if I removed you, this gist of it is, we don't talk much, I have no reason to need to know when you are online and/or initiate regular chats with you.  Certainly doesn't mean I'm not willing to talk to you. 

Anyway, was kinda fun to do the housecleaning.  There's a couple of legacy network contacts I still need to boot, but that involves well....  finishing adding support for that in the IM Gateway plugin.  ;D  or rather, fixing it

I'm thinking about spending a little time and packaging up PyICQt and PyAIMt into 0.8 releases.  PyAIMt is more work because it means I'll be pulling over updates from PyICQt to PyAIMt, but hey, no worries.

I got to try out an eval version of Jabber XCP.  I will finally have something to test XCP support with with the Pys!  Yay!  Setting up XCP was not entirely trivial.  It took me about an hour and a half and about 80 pages of documentation.  I'm not sure how much of this was postgres sucking or not, but it definitely wasn't as easy a process as I expected.  That said, now that it's running, it's lightning fast.  (well it's also not handling the load of my real contact list, but still)  Anyway, thanks to the XCP folk for hooking me up with a copy to test against!  I've always hated supporting something I couldn't test myself. 

I've been finding that some of these java based tools for .. well all sorts of tasks .. are quite nice.  I like Jive's forum software quite a bit, I adore Fisheye... far more useful to me than websvn ever was.  In fact websvn was never really useful to me.  I also adore JIRA, though I must admit it's a little too "serious" for something I'd probably want to use with my Py transports.  I love it for the IM Gateway plugin though.  It's got a really nifty feel to it.  Something else I think is really neat is that it looks like a lot of the the folk that make such products "play nice together".  By that I mean, I see Jive Software (Jive Forums) using JIRA and Fisheye, Cenqua (Fisheye) using Jive Forums.. don't know if they use JIRA, the JIRA people using Jive Forums ... etc etc.  Same with IntelliJ... it's just really neat to see them all using each other products.  It's like one big product hug circle.  =)

I'm basically in charge of Java-JML nowadays.  The former developer doesn't have time for it anymore.  Sourceforge is still kinda similar to how I remember it, but they do appear to have a few neat new things.  =)  I like the project and am certainly cool with being in charge of it.  Will give me a better understanding of MSN anyway.  I've applied for an open source license of IntelliJ of my own so I can make use of it with non Jive projects.  At first I was tentative about this because I didn't want to start using a tool that like the original developer of java-jml couldn't use, but I based off the license, I could indeed share it with all other devs on the project.  That's very cool.  More importantly, I saw that the joscar folk and other such projects are using it, which gave me a lot of "ohhh  other similar projects are doing it, ok then" warm fuzzy.  =)

While this weekend has not really started off on a happy note, I think I might make it a release day and try to get a couple of things released today.

The Wildfire gateway plugin is coming along.  Not as fast as I'd like at the moment, but I keep running into minor stumbling blocks outside the context of the actual plugin (read: getting sick, that sort of thing).  That said, I'm switching internal libraries for MSN.  The one I was using does not behave well in a multi-user environment.  Furthermore, it had some kind of annoying debugging that there wasn't an easy way to turn off.  I've switched to a more recent looking library.  It was between that and another one whose documentation was all in... I believe Korean.  All things considered, the function call names were in english, so I could have muddled through, but if both look good, why not choose the one I can read.  We'll see how that goes.  This one requires a little more knowledge of the underlying concepts of MSN's IM.  It'll be fine.  =)

As for the Py's, I've done nothing with them for a bit now.  The pubsub stuff I was working on was causing some file system problems and, on top of that, the recent updates to pep makes my work semi-useless.  No worries, I'm glad to see it doable in a much nicer fashion.  James is working hard on some wonderful new revampings to the underlying code for PyMSNt that I'm looking forward to pulling on over to PyICQt and PyAIMt.  I will, however, watch and wait until things look like they're good to go.  I don't have a gauge for this, so I'll just post it aloud here...  do people want me to put out a PyICQ-t and PyAIM-t with all of my current updates that's an actual release?  (underlying code will be cleaned up to lose the pubsub stuff first if I do that)  Otherwise, I'll be waiting for some bigger updates.

It's interesting to note that looking at code in one language sometimes helps you clarify concepts in your head  in another.  Just the way joscar does a few things made me go "oohhhh  yeah I could do that with pyaim as well".  shrug  I thought it was neat...

I've been racking my brain over a bizarre problem I've run into.  I may have posted about it before but I want to post fresh about it regardless.

There is an occasional problem that occurs with PyICQt and PyAIMt (specifically.. oscar.py) where outgoing messages are "delayed by one".  By that I mean, lets say you send a message.  It does not leave the machine.  However, when you go to type another message, the typing notification triggers the message to leave, and now the typing notification is stuck.  I have watched these events come into oscar.py, go through everything they need to go through, and "leave my code" via self.transport.write.  At the same time, I'm sitting here watching the network traffic coming from the box and nothing leaves.  (until the next event occurs)  It's only outgoing events too.

So here's some misc notes I've made about this:

- does not occur with Twisted 1.3.0, started happening in Twisted 2.*

- does not appear to occur with the epoll reactor, but I haven't tested this thoroughly

- thought it was only the poll reactor, but that doesn't appear to be true

- occurs with python 2.2 - 2.4

- can occur on both mac os x and linux

I had a thought the other day that perhaps I'm accidentally overriding some important variable that is used by a protocol.Protocol, but that does not appear to be the case.  I did notice that I'm using ClientCreator which in Twisted 1.3.0 was listed as unstable.  Seems to not be in Twisted 2.*.  However, I don't really see anything different there.

I find it highly unlikely that my code is NOT causing this in some way, but something beyond my code is where the problem is really occuring.  I would expect to see a lot of posts on the twisted lists if it weren't being caused by my code in some way.

Bah, I have no idea what's going on.  I don't have hard facts on this yet, but I believe that it doesn't always "start" like this.  Like occasionally I'll be fine, no delay, and then it will 'come on' at some point.  Then again, maybe it's just that I had events going at the time that were triggering everything to run correctly.

My original thought was that I wasn't finishing off my packets to OSCAR in some way and OSCAR was sitting there waiting for me to finish my statement, so to speak.  However, I've been able to observe the messages never leaving in the first place.  So ... bah.

I don't feel like I have enough hard facts to put together to bug the twisted community with.  I feel like I'd be saying "well there's something wrong, but I can't prove it".  How useful is that?  =/

I don't understand why Twisted 1.3.0 doesn't have this problem.  That part is extremely weird to me.

On a mild aside before I get into this, I added a little project tracker to my blog.  Pretty nice.  Obviously I'm always working on JWGC (to a lesser extent lately), PyAIM, and PyICQ, but I often have little side project spinoffs or "major" things I want to do with the transports or JWGC.  I dunno, they seem to fit well into a little mini project tracker.  =)

Anyway, so people keep asking me to implement idle status in a better way.  Currently I am aware of only a couple of methods of doing this:

1) jabber:iq:last, requires polling this attribute regularly if you want to keep up with idle time, eww

2) adding the idle time to a presence status string, useful if you are reading said status field, not useful otherwose

3) simply setting the status to away, and extended away, as the person gets more and more idle... many folk don't like this way of handling idle.  I don't either.  I think idle is 'it's own thing'

So my proposal is this...  PEP seems to be the way and the light nowadays.  I believe idle status fits well into the pubsub model.  If you want to know the person's idle status, you subscribe to it, and you get update as the client itself 'sends' updates.  More importantly, it doesn't have to be updated much.  If your client decides that you are idle, it sets your PEP idle status to the timestamp when you started being idle.  At that point, it doesn't have to be updated until you come back.  Pretty efficient if you ask me.  Anyway, I believe this is a good way to go and on top of that, it would allow idle and away and such to be independent of each other.  You could easily see Away but only idle for 5 minutes.  Or away but idle for 3 days.  You get the idea.  Clients could easily handle this and set a cute little idle icon or something.  So I'm aiming to write up a JEP for this and submit it.

Well, after long last I released 0.7.  I was very hesitant to do so as there are still a slew of bug reports open.  Thing is, it's hard to tell if they are still occuring.  I wanted to get everyone on the same page.  More importantly, I wanted more folk to be able to enjoy the new features.  Here's hoping it does not take too heavy of a beatdown of new bug reports.  =)  Typically right after a release is when I see a slew of new big bug reports, so I'm ready for them.  Don't be surprised if there's a 0.7a out soonish, but I believe all of the major issues are worked out and I'm comfortable that I did the right thing by releasing it.  I don't know, I'm always nervous putting out a new release.

Why is PyICQ's release taking so long?

Well, primarily because avatars and ICQ aren't as functional.  As I mentioned earlier, there's other entirely different methods of handling icons and I am reluctant to release a new version until I have avatars happy.  There's plenty of bugs to tackle.  =(

Well ok, then why are you working on the web interface?

Because I'm frustrated with the avatars are the moment and want to do something fun for a bit.  =)  I'll get back to avatars soon.  The web interface isn't taking that long.  My goal is to integrate WebReg into a built-in interface that comes with the transport.  This will also provide a way for people without a full-service jabber client to register with the transport.

How are the encoding problems coming?

Sadly, it's hard to tell.  Since I don't speak or write in other languages, it's typically difficult for me to tell if it's working correctly until someone else tells me it's busted.  It seems like every time I get the UTF support going good, I've broken something else in the process.

You were considering adding groupchat back... any luck?

No.  I thought maybe I could connect to AIM chatrooms or something.  Does not appear to work.  I tried multi-chat functionality in the real ICQ 5 client and well, it's not "real" chat support.  It's "we're going to take you to this flash program that's basically IRC".  Whatever works . . . but I think I'll be yanking that support back out.

Any other big gotchas?

ICQ used to only be plain text messages.  Period.  However as of I think ICQ 5 they now have html-ified messages.  This makes parsing the messages very confusing -except- that I did discover that there's a flag that's attached to the message to say "hey, this is html".

Any other big noteworthy items?

Robert Quattlebaum hooked me up with a wonderful patch set to fix up xhtml support and a lot of other fixes.  I need to massage it into both the PyAIM and PyICQ code.

Why massage?

Well, parts of his changes involve fixing the tlib pieces.  Most of tlib is "stuff that was busted in Twisted 1 that we had to fix".  Twisted 2 fixed things and we started using the real pieces.   So his patches to the tlib stuff I have to evaluate to make sure things are functional under Twisted 2.  I don't really want to have a "stub Twisted piece" again, so ... well we'll see.  I always massage in patches anyway.  There's often minor tweaks I do here and there, or I move functionality around.  I am trying to be very conscious of what should go in oscar.py and what should go in the transport, because oscar.py -is- still meant to go back into Twisted some day.

Any estimate on a release?

Not really, but I'm hoping for soon.  I may put out a "lots of improvements but not everything is fixed" release at some point.  Just to get more people on the same page, get us all working with the same thing, get those new features out.  (there's a lot of them)

Whatcha been doing with the web interface anyway?

Well, I used to have a "websecret" config option and there was one and only one password that could be used.  What I've done is, with the help of thetofu's code from palaver, switched the authentication to be "auth against a jabber server".  My goal here is that you can log in as yourself, if you are an admin you see admin stuff, but normally you just see some info about your account -or- you get to register from the web form and not have to deal with 8 bazillion "hey, wanna accept this buddy into your roster?".  Before I go too far into this I think I'll enforce SSL.  Anyway, I think this'll be pretty fun.  I also want to make it so an admin could change config options and shut down/start up the transport itself while leaving the web interface going.  Don't think that will be too hard.