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Posts for August 2005

RSS Feed working again.

30th August, 2005     Planet Atomic,

Apologies to people subscribed to the Planet Atomic RSS Feed (either RSS 1 or RSS 2).

A unescaped string in the default planetplanet config for both rss types caused post titles with an ampersand (&) in them, to cause the document to not parse correctly.

This has now been fixed. :-)

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Speaking of Google Talk

26th August, 2005     Google,

Not everyone believes Google Talk is all good news. Nugget believes that even tho Google is using the same protocol as Jabber, that Google is just again isolating IM clients, where the point of Jabber was interoperability with any number of servers, whether they be your own, or some of the public servers.

A good (long) read, and well worth the time. I for one, do agree with many of the points raised.

Unfortunately as I noted to him on IRC, Google Talk is not designed for those who actually care about the underlying protocol. The audience it is trying to attract, in most cases, would care more about the fact that Google Talk allows them to use a whole new range of Emoticons, then this fact.

Unfortunate, but true.

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Google, Talk and more.

24th August, 2005     Google, IRC, Life, Linux, WWW,

For those that have been living in a cave this week, Google has announced it's Instant Messenger client, namely 'Google Talk'. While it is in beta (is anything at google not in beta?), thanks to its use of the Jabber/XMPP protocol, it means that already there are clients for all operating systems available (well, any that supports Jabber, naturally).

This means that you don't need to download yet another IM Client, or wait for GAIM or BitlBee, to update the source, to include the protocol and functionality for it. However, BitlBee users should note, that they will need to apply this patch to order to be able to use the gmail service, due to minor account differences in gmail's set up. See www.bitlbee.org for more info. (Yes port 5223, the default Jabber port works for me, where 5222, the google talk port, doesn't).

Meanwhile, I now have another means of contact that I will never use. I do use bitlbee for my instant message conversations, as it moulds nicely into my IRC Client, but i still converse mostly thru IRC. I guess IM is just there for the people who need to contact me and are bedazzled by all the shiny parts of IM clients (fuck you emoticons).

And while I have your attention, on a side note, has anyone noticed that Google is doing similar things to what Microsoft do, in regards to how they name their applications or services. That being, naming the product simply after the task it does, in order for it to become more "easier to remember", I would imagine. To compare:

Microsoft Products: Word, Paint, Office, Messenger Google Products: Talk, Search, Desktop Search, Alerts.

The only products which seem to have a unique names, are products they have gained due to the purchase of/from other companies.

Your thoughts on google talk and the rest are welcomed.

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GNUpod

24th August, 2005     Life, Ubuntu,

Since buying my iPod Photo months ago, I have never updated the songs on it, because I haven't been able to find a decent tool for Linux that works well (atleast for me).

I had tried GTKpod previously, but had found that it overall, it didn't work as well as it should, or maybe it was me not understanding its functionality right.

Anyway, skip forward to the a few days ago, and I was finally getting sick listening to the same songs (and podcasts), over and over again. It was time to change the songs on the iPod. I gathered this meant one of two things; installing gtkpod and trying to get it to work, or borrowing a friends computer with windows on it, to copy on some songs.

Deciding against the later, I was going to install gtkpod again, when i realised that gnupod was there. Tho it is text based, i decided to try it out.

After some minor difficulties with the scripts, mainly relating to case sensitive nature (see the end for more info), due to the default ubuntu flags when it mounted, i finally got the scripts working, and I must say, I am impressed. The advantage is they are perl scripts, so they are changable to customise a bit how I want them.

So this weekend, I might actually put some new songs on my iPod, and be able to listen to fresh G'Day World podcasts on the train each morning.

Note: The problem was because of the default Ubuntu settings for mounts. I didn't have my iPod set up in fstab, so whenever it plugged it, it got these default settings. To fix, it was as simple as adding the "check=r" flag to the mount options, either in fstab, or mounting it manually. See this email thread for more information.

Also, Ubuntu also by default adds the flag "iocharset=utf8", when mounting. It seems that this flag, overrides the check flag. So for now, I have simply removed it. If anyone has a solution to this, would be great, thanks.

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IMAP daemons

11th August, 2005     Linux,

I have been thinking over the last few months about implementing an IMAP daemon to look after my mail, then my current method, which is to use POP3.

I had a look at the IMAPd from the University of Washington, and it is simple enough to implement, and set up, but I was hoping to use something with a bit more configuration (not so it is harder to set up, but so i can refine some of the options).

Anyone have any suggestions for something decent? If so, leave a comment.

Note: Someone I know did mention to have a look at Cyrus (which I will do), but does anyone have any comments on it before I do?

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Is IRC, Isn't freenode.

9th August, 2005     IRC, Life, Rants,

freenode, an IRC network by any other name (no, I will not call it a "Discussion network").

I hang out on freenode, to talk with some friends that I have made over the years, and also to get help and assist with some open source projects, namely Ubuntu and irssi, when I can.

However, I am most likely classified by Rob Levin, as one of the people he calls a 'Traditional IRC User'. What is a Traditional IRC User? Well you can read his thoughts on them on this wiki page. Do that before reading on. It should be noted that Rob Levin has not always been popular with everybody.

OK. Now that you have read the wiki page (and the quotes which are considerably biased to what a Traditional IRC User would call an 'idiot'), you might understand some of my disagreements with the stance.

The reason I have mentioned Traditional IRC Users, is because the following is going to detail annoyances that Traditional IRC Users and myself are going to have with freenode in a very short period of time.

NOIDPREFIX

Many IRC networks use nickname registration services. I don't have a problem with nickname registration services as they have their benefits and disadvantages. However, freenode will soon be implementing a policy, which will mean that people will not only be able to register a nick they want, but by doing so, all variants of it are automatically registered to them. This means if you register the nickname 'foo', you also have the exclusive right to own nicknames with 'foo' in them. For example, and not limited to.

foo foo_ foo` foo foo-1 [foo] foo|ATHOME foo[WORK]

People can say "this will help, because I then i don't have to register each of those nicknames", but their is a major problem with this.

Say you wanted the nickname 'Foo_Fighter', well, you could not have it, because someone, in this case, already owns the nickname 'foo'. Why? Well because 'foo' is registered to someone, and 'Foo_Fighter' is a variant of 'foo'. Sure, he could use 'FooFighter', but that may already be taken.

A more problematic example, is one expressed by The_Tick (I think you can see already what his problem is going to be).

The_Tick also makes a good point about nick changes being used to indicate if you are away or not. Something again, that Traditional IRC Users have complained about before.

I know a number of people who are going to have similar problems, and would prefer to use the nicknames they already have for years, then having to pick another one. It would be easier in these cases for us to use elsewhere, simply because no other network has problems of such a scale, other than freenode.

I could add more to this, but i suggest instead that you complain to policy@freenode.net, especially if you use the network, to complain about these changes.

You can see the full policy draft on the freenode site.

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