Paul's Web Pages

Trying Jaiku

Paul van Tilburg — 2008-02-13T00:00:00+01:00

Last weekend I have decided to just try some of this micro-blogging and lifestreaming stuff. I have always been quite conscious about my own (online) presence and that of others due to long term Jabber usage. The presence-awareness helps me to somehow stay more connected to people on a kind of general level than previously was possible. By the way, this is just because I like to, not because it is a forced, mandatory thing. Concerning micro-blogging. This is a perfect solution for me! I don’t have to think of a title and just can share a thought for whoever is interested whenever.

Anyway, I ended up subscribing to Jaiku. It has a richer feature set than Twitter and it seems more things are “done right” to me. I especially like the comments and channels. I have added a Jaiku Stream Badge to my webpage so I am also trackable there.

Let’s see if I can keep it up. :-)

Moved Jabber Server

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-09-18T00:00:00+02:00

I finally decided to move the Jabber server of luon.net to a different server. Our main luon.net server was being fairly loaded for weeks because of the business of the S2S component. The transition was a lot easier than I had expected and everyone got to keep his/her JID.

Some tips/hints concerning the steps I took:

First I moved all our services’ DNS names to a CNAME of jabber.luon.net, that is:
```
  msn 1800 IN CNAME jabber
  icq 1800 IN CNAME jabber
  s2s 1800 IN CNAME jabber
  c2s 1800 IN CNAME jabber
  …
```
Note that jabber.luon.net still has the same addresses as luon.net at this time.
I also added SRV records for luon.net so XMPP servers and some of the clients can find us right away. (Since the server won’t be running on luon.net anymore, the @luon.net-JIDs still will let everything try to contact us there). The SRV records used:
```
  jabber.tcp      1800 IN SRV 5 1 jabber.luon.net.
  xmpp-client.tcp 1800 IN SRV 5 1 jabber.luon.net.
  xmpp-server.tcp 1800 IN SRV 5 1 jabber.luon.net.
```
With that done, I installed all components we use on the new machine, rsynced the configuration, restarted the server and services and tested the connection.
Then, I modified the address of jabber.luon.net to point to the new host and let it propagate.
Next, I sent a MOTD (luon.net/announce/motd) about our server move and notified the users that if their clients do not support SRV records, they will not be able to login anymore and they’ll have to change the server address in the client¹.
Finally, I installed a second C2S component on luon.net that connects to the main XMPP router component on the other host for transition purpose. I’ll leave it on for two weeks.

It’s a pity that SRV records aren’t used more these days. But I guess the whole sub-domain and multiplex-by-CNAME stuff came earlier (why doesn’t your website start with ‘www.’?).

¹ I thank Google for introducing the gmail.com JIDs <→ talk.google.com server discrepancy so that now all clients can configure the server separately from the JID.

Working, Cooking

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-07-31T00:00:00+02:00

I haven’t written for a while, I have been busy with working and well… cooking, eating and watching movies with friends.

Cooking

Bram was left parentless the past two weeks, so he had to do some real cooking for the first time in his life. We set up cook-shifts in our group of friends (Admar, Bas, Bram, Christian and me) to provide everyone with a nice dinner every evening and transfer some of our cooking experience to Bram. Since Bram is a vegetarian, it was a learning experience for us all. Fortunately, it all worked out really well, we made (among other things):

Lasagna bolognese
Pesto wraps
Chili sen carne
Curry something

Working

Work has progressed very nicely the past two weeks. Our (Bram and me) task is to build a DV conferencing application for the desktop. Yes, this means streaming and receiving 30Mb/s full-duplex. The first building block we have created is a D-BUS service that can startup, pause and stop programs or GStreamer pipelines (depends on what is available at that moment) to route DV data from DV/RTP, TCP, FireWire bus etc. to the screen, back to the FireWire bus. Also a command line tool was created to control the router process.

Next is to make a GNOME2 GUI tool to create a nicer interface for the router called VideBabilo. I have made a small mock-up, the implementation be done next week (that is, if we get that far).

Note that this will still just dial/connect to a host, since there is not protocol yet. We plan to add this later, possible by means of XMPP (Jabber). This protocol probably will handle: inviting to a conference, rejecting calls, ending a call, etc. First peer-to-peer (like GnomeMeeting) and then talking to multiple people.

Jabber and YTex

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-10-05T00:00:00+02:00

Jabber RFCs 3920 — 3922

Today, the IETF published the Jabber (actually XMPP) protocols as RFCs with the Proposed Standard status. See also the press release on jabber.org . I am happy to see this! Using Jabber for almost 4 years now, I’ve noticed it has grown through the years and Jabber contacts dominate my roster since the past months. In my opinion, Jabber suffers a bit from decentralisation. On the lists I see a lot of stuff happening but nobody that controls it at all. The XMPP system is capable of so much neat stuff, I hope this brings back the drive in FOSS developers to work on Jabber, and the industry as well.

YTex

Working with Hobix and Textile a lot, I got kindof a vibe/idea yesterday. Looking at the source of the Poignant Guide I saw it was totally done in YAML to, so… What if the power of Textile is combined with YAML for structuring text as pre-language for generating LaTeX files. It’s not that I dislike writing LaTeX and want to discard it or something, but for rapid documenting, this could be really nice. An example:

 
 title: An YTex document 
 author: Paul van Tilburg
sections:
- First section: >
Bla bla, this is the first section.
- Second section:
- >
Hmm, if there are more sections, heading stuff goes
here.  I can do bold text and emphasized text.
- First subsection: >
A subjection with a  and a
table:
| head1 | head2 |
| key1  | 3.0   |
| key2  | 15.0  |

I’ve started hacking a bit and so far the structure stuff is working out. Getting Textile to work for LaTeX instead of HTML is a different story. You will hear more of this… if it doesn’t work out, you won’t. :)