Notes

No, I’m not going to talk more about Google Talk :). I’m going to bed now, I’ve been up since 5am to do an upgrade to our XMPP server platform. It went pretty well, but we still have some glitches with S2S. They should be solved real soon now. I wanted to talk you about the stack of perl books I have here, from Higher-Order Perl to Perl Testing going through Perl Best Practices, but it will have to wait until next week.

I’ve been using IMAP for the last 3 or 4 years now. I used the Mulberry client for quite some time, and then I moved to Mail.app. I use 5 different IMAP accounts, my anti-spam is client-side, using the wonderful SpamSieve, and right now, all this accounts take 1.5Gb. Of those, 1.3Gb is a single IMAP account that I label archive and that I’m most likely trash in a near future.

It seems that Warner Music is launching a music label with only online distribution, no CDs. At least from the environment point of view, I wholly welcome that. Nowadays, 90% of the music I buy is from iTunes Music Store, I prefer not to waste the packaging and CD, that will sit on a shelf somewhere after I rip them to iTunes…

Guys, yes, I agree that the Google Talk client is too simple: no offline messages; no “spiffy” flash stuff and emoticons with gazilion skins; no file transfer; no multi-user chat; etc, etc, etc. That’s great! That only means that we can build our own clients, with those features, and compete. Imagine that, real competition in the IM world. The best client wins. I’m not letting go of my Psi, I can tell you that.

There are a lot of servers that you can install and join the XMPP world. There is an up-to-date server list at the Jabber Foundation website. My current recomendation goes to Jive Messenger. Very easy to setup and to manage. Also, for a turn-key solution for your company, your should look at Jabber Now.

This is the current list of things to discover about the usage of XMPP in Google Talk. What is the signaling protocol that they are using? They are using TLS so it’s not just a matter of sniffing the packets, but it should be available somewhere real soon now :); How are they advertising the Voice capabilities of each clients? This is another big one to deal with interoperable clients.

Ok, it’s out for real. First things first: question 15 of their FAQ, first paragraph, last sentence: We can say this, though: we believe strongly in user choice and open standards, and we are committed to letting users access Google Talk using the client and platform of their choice, as well as to enabling our users to talk with users from other service providers. Emphasis mine. The entire point is clearly stated in question 16 though: we are in business to open up IM networks.

Check out MacDevCenter article on Xgrid by Drew McCormack. Xgrid is nothing terrible new, for those who where into distributed systems in collage. I was into them, and it was my favorite subject, the one I got the best grades. What make me click about this one is the fact that for the first time that I remember, a full distributed computing platform is being distributed with a mainstream operation system.

Google Talk service is now live although you still get a 404 at the site. I was able to connect with Adium using Jabber as the account type, and my gmail login. Some notes: this is NOT jabber, it’s XMPP: Google Talk requires TLS for connection at port 5222; Server-to-server is not yet operational, don’t know if it will: SRV DNS records are still MIA; Port 5223 is open and Psi with SSL can connect.

If you don’t have the time to keep up with all that going on in the perl6 world, you can get a taste of the language now. Rafael Garcia Suarez has written a IRC bot named Shakti.