Slaad's Programming Stuff

So, some of you may have read some news regarding the IM Kit and moving to OS Drawer: this is in fact, correct.

The upside of this, along with some nice project support features, is that the project has become a little more active. Of interest to some people might be a recent check in by some weird Australia which mentions something about updated MSN protocol support. Who knows what that's all about!

So, as of March 31st 2008 you may have noticed that the SoundPlay InfoPopper plug-in ceased to download cover art. The service it used was officially turned off (having been closing since early 2007). In all that time I'd not gotten around to porting it to use the new Amazon AWS. This has now been completed... unfortunately, I've forgotten my OS Drawer password and the site is flagged as an open relay, preventing me from receiving - or sending - from OS Drawer. As such, if anyone knows hows to contact the site maintainers of OS Drawer, I'd appreciate it if the message was passed along that they are running on an open mail relay, and that they should fix it.

Pier Luigi Fiorini has just informed me that InfoPopper now "works and runs on Haiku". Now you can be notified of all sorts of snazzy things whilst using Haiku. Neat!

Updated code is available from the OS Drawer InfoPopper site

Something I've wanted to do for a long time is to get rid of the InfoPopper. It's not that I don't like it - I can't live without it - but it just doesn't belong in the IM Kit repository any more. I see it as having a life of its own. What's the point of this? Well, I'd like to keep both "applications" (IM Kit and InfoPopper) as simple as possible. I want the barrier to developer (and user) entry to be as low as possible.

Pier Luigi Fiorini (Who I don't have an URL to link to) had set up a project on OSDrawer.net for the InfoPopper. Having been given access yesterday, I've just finished importing some requirements from the IM Kit repository and fixing the makefiles.

I'll leave the InfoPopper in the IM Kit repository for the next few weeks in case anyone with outstanding changes (Hah!) would like to commit them, and I'll move them over to the OSDrawer project. After that time I'll delete the InfoPopper from the IM Kit repository to avoid confusion.

A scary thing has happened recently... there's been some checkins into the IM Kit depot!

A few days ago I added some changes to prevent MSN from crashing on login sometimes. These appear to have worked to a certain degree, but I still need to do some more work. Additionally xeD has made it possible to use GTalk with servers other than Gmail (Googlemail.com, for instance). I've also merged in some changes to the Yahoo add-on courtesy of the guys working on Zeta. So now it has typing notifications and buddy icon support. To use the new Yahoo add-on you'll require a newer build of libyahoo2. I've made available a source zip (Again, courtesy of the Zeta guys) that'll compiles.

So it appears that not everyone who works on the IM Kit isn't dead, after all. I, for one, am still alive (as evidenced by my month old post). In order to prove my not-dead-ness I have just updated the OSCAR (AIM / ICQ) code in the depot. Nothing will change for the end user, but it makes a small section of the code purdier

Confused by the post title? Good. You should be. "How not to speak English" aside, I've just finished with a new IM Kit client - the im_idle_filter. What's it do? Well, what doesn't it do? Put the seat down after peeing and use a glass when drinking milk. To the more serious answer of what it does... well it's an input_server filter that sets your IM status as away with a configurable away message after a configurable amount of time. You can also configure it to return you from away when you return.

It's a feature that's been sorely missed and, well, now it's there. It'll be in the depot in a bit... I can't commit for some strange reason, so when m_eiman wakes up, or whatever crazy Svedish people do at 21:44 AEST, it should go into the depot.

So a friend of mine, let's call him AGoodWilderbeast, has been bugging me to incorporate a feature into the IM Kit to allow him to tell which of his friends are yuppies, and which are not. During the course of my OSCAR rewrite, I added support for this feature, but ran into an im_server snag. I've just finished discussing some stuff with m_eiman to fix the issue. As a result, I come bearing screenshots

Names blurred to protect the innocent

For those of you who don't speak fluent Slaad....OSCAR protocols will detect if the user is using a wireless device (Or a Sidekick) and report this to the im_server. The im_client will then indicate this to the end user, next to the typing notifications. It's the little wireless icon that you can see in the bottom leftish region.

Okay, big news kids. I've added my ICQ/AIM changes to the depot. The AIM plugin is gone, it's now the OSCAR plugin, which can be built to work with either AIM or ICQ.

At this stage, to build it for AIM just do make. For ICQ do make -f makefile.icq

I apologise for this, but I'm not a makefile monkey. Interesting other things... you can now use the cross protocol capability. So if all you use is ICQ but some of your friends use AIM you can create a new contact with a connection of icq:someaimscreenname and you should be able to message them fine. Also there's a new client which will add a contact to your server side buddy list. It uses the Person file's "group" information to create, and add, groups for the person to reside in. Yay!

There's no pictures, but they wouldn't really help. This is pretty exciting news (I think, anyhow) and we can now ditch using libicq2000. Which also means if someone was so inclined and got the OSCAR plugin to work with net_server it'd work for both AIM and ICQ. And now... I'm buggered.

So, a while ago I did some work on the AIM protocol and tried to separate the AIM specific stuff as much as possible and make it a general OSCAR plugin. As part of this work I attempted to connect to ICQ, which didn't work. Today I was pondering that and had a bit of a play. It turns out that ICQ uses a different password roast than AIM. So I fixed that, did a snippet of coding, and was able to connect to ICQ using the AIM plugin. What's even more snazzy is that it... works. I can send and receive messages from users on ICQ, get their buddy icons, and presumably typing notifications. And... I can send messages to AIM users. Although, they can't reply. And I appear offline, as do they to me. Interesting stuff.

Me, talking to myself

Above you can see me sending a message from ICQ on the IM Kit to the official AIM client. If you're wondering how I took that screenshot, it's an rdesktop session.