Jabber Soup

Last sunday, we finished our week-long Swift Hackathon, and it was a great success, leading to Swift 2.0-beta1! Here’s a list of the things we achieved during that week.

First of all, the goal of the week was to find and fix as many bugs as possible. This is what our ‘hackathon bug count dials’ were displaying at the end of the week:

In only one week, we found 19 bugs, and fixed 64! Not a bad result for our first hackathon, don’t you think? As you can see from the trend, we put a big dent in the list of open bugs:

And if fixing all these bugs wasn’t enough, we found the time to do some other things on the side as well during the week:

• Together with Olly Betts, we finished our Debian packages, and submitted them to Debian. So, expect both Swift and Swiften to be available from the official Debian repositories soon!
• We set up a build for the brand new Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin)
• We started fixing and cleaning up translation strings

Thanks again to all the people who have helped us during this excellent week!

Identity and Privacy are a growing concern on the Internet nowadays, and there have been different attempts to solve this.

One of the most recent ones is BrowserID. The XSF believes however, that building upon the strengths of XMPP would be a great way forward for the BrowserID concept, due to its inherent federation, proven Internet-wide scalability, and decentralised architecture.

This is why the XSF has decided to support projects that demonstrate the use of XMPP for BrowserID purposes. In order to do this, the first step is to get a Request for Proposals designed, so that the XSF can establish criteria to decide which projects to support financially.

We’ll have an initial open discussion tomorrow:

Time / Date: 15:00 UTC (16:00 UK; 17:00 CET, 11:00 EDT, 08:00 PDT) / 05.05.2012
Location: xsf@muc.xmpp.org

So if you’re interested in joining us to shape the future of Identity on the Internet, please drop by!

Syntax highlighting for Tigase code examples in our documentation has been lost after last, minor Drupal update. We are aware of it and we are working on bringing it back.

For some reason the old markup for the highlighting engine is no longer recognized. Therefore all code examples using this markup are displayed as a plain text.

There is another markup which seems to work fine, however, converting all the code examples is a manual and slow work which takes some time. Also we might be missing some of the pages in the process. Therefore, if you find a page which is not fixed yet, please let us know.

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In his famous 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech, Steve Jobs explained how his interest in typography played a fundamental role in creating the first Macintosh computer, and how the beautiful typography set the Mac apart from other personal computers out there. He was obviously passionate about these things, going as far as pixel-perfectionism about fonts and icons. That's why I was a bit shocked when I started noticing bad kerning (aka keming) in the iOS 5 status bar. Could it be that these are the first artifacts of the post-Steve Jobs World?

Spoiler alert: As XKCD points out, recognizing bad kerning is something you may not want to learn about. If you like your iOS status bar, consider not reading on.

Have a look at the battery level indicator of the iOS screenshot below:

Now compare that 44 with the one from the clock. Doesn't look right, does it? How about something a bit more obvious: charge your iDevice to 100%, and you see the following:

That 1 in the battery level almost looks like it's coming from a different font?! Still not convinced? How about 15%?

You have to admit that this is much worse than pixel-imperfectionisms. Even if this was post-Steve, or Steve always had his battery level indicator turned off, you would have come to expect someone at Apple must be annoyed by this, surely?

I know I'm nitpicking, but the problem is that, if you noticed it once, you will notice it every time you look at your status bar. The only solution: disable the battery level indicator.

It’s with great pleasure that we would like to share with you the list of students that have been selected to participate in the Google Summer of Code 2012 for the XMPP Standards Foundation.

• Cătălin Badea
  Conversation history support for Swift
• Denis Washington
  PubSub HTTP Interface for buddycloud
• Mateusz Piękos
  Swift – Whiteboarding
• Pawel Domas
  XMPP-Jitsi: PseudoTCP
• Rodrigo Duarte
  An XMPP Media Server
• sarangbh
  Twitter Backend for Spectrum
• Yoann Blein
  Swift – Screen Sharing

Congratulations to all of you, and thanks to everyone who submitted an idea for this year. We are looking forward to an interesting summer ahead. You can find more information about the Google Summer of Code on the Wiki.

A while back we realised that some of the changes we needed to make for the Prosody 0.9 release were not trivial, and involved breaking some established core APIs. We have traditionally kept our trunk repository "stable" for everyday testers who aren't worried about the occasional bug, so we decided to open up a new branch for in-progress, and potentially broken, work. This branch gained the name 'timber' (broken trunk) - timber also happens to be the Old English term for a building, and more appropriately the act of building.

And that's exactly what we've been doing. We have revamped a bunch of APIs in Prosody, from port management to our built-in HTTP server (used for BOSH, among other things). We've also moved the bulk of our c2s and s2s code into modules, which makes them fully reloadable without a server restart.

Some of our important new features destined for 0.9.0 landed or improved in timber. These include our much-requested IPv6 support, as well as certificate authentication for server-to-server streams.

Of course one of the primary goals of Prosody is to remain small and simple. All the while we have continued actively looking for unused code, especially in small features which were added that never took off,or could be replaced by less code, and removing it. This means that despite all the new features we have added, our code has only grown from the previous release by around 40KB. This means we still fit comfortably on a floppy disk alongside a copy of Lua, panic over!

Well, as announced on the Prosody mailing list, we merged timber into trunk today. This means for the first time the new code is available in our nightly builds, in trunk build #271.

Since all this code has had limited testing (a brave (read: 'crazy') group of us have been running our servers on timber for some time). Now that it's out in the open we expect more bugs to be uncovered, if you run into any then please let us know so we can squash them in preparation for the release.

I finally leave you with the obligatory picture of a piece of timber. Oh, and of course a cat. On a sawmill.

We're just halfway through our Swift Hackathon, so we thought we'ld update you about the progress we've made so far. In fact, a screenshot of our live hackathon week bug counter sums this up quite well:

That's right: in merely a couple of days, we managed to fix 50 (more than half!) of the open bugs, and found 17 new bugs. And what's more: we still have the whole weekend ahead of us, so you still have a chance to join us in fixing, testing, and improving Swift!

A big thank you to all the people who have been helping us out so far!

buddycloud is really proud to be working with two great students from Google’s Summer of Code program.

Denis Washington will be building an HTTP API to buddycloud.

buddycloud has an event driven architecture (everything in buddycloud is realtime and events can happen on any domain that runs buddycloud).

Soon, developers who want to extend buddycloud will benefit from the new HTTP API: Denis’s HTTP API will give developers a nice way to plug existing JSON-based queries into buddycloud’s realtime architecture. buddycloud users will still have the  “ooooh this is fast and nice” experience.

Rodrigo Duarte will be building a buddycloud media server (GSOC proposal).

The buddycloud media server makes it so simple to drag and drop media into a channel and chat message. Media is magically permissioned to the person you are talking with or the followers of your channel. But simple-to-use will mean that Rodrigo will be working hard on a design that removes all user confusion and “just works”.

I’m really looking forward to working with Rodrigo and Denis and to using their code in production.

Also, a huge thanks to Kev for coordinating and organising the Google summer of code. Without him, none of this would be possible. Thanks Kev.

Welcome Google summer of code programmers!

Five years ago I posted about an idea I had to publish a book of poems in Sapphic meter (my favorite poetic form). Today I published three such poems at The Monadnock Press: Come, Let Us Sound With Melody by Thomas Campion (1601), Lines Written During A Period Of Insanity by William Cowper (ca. 1773), and Sapphics by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1904). These supplement three odes by Horace that I translated years ago (The Muses' Friend, It's Better to Live, and This Aegean Storm), as well as Deathless Aphrodite on Your Lavish Throne by Sappho herself (a translation with which I'm still not completely happy). I need to look into translating a few poems by Sappho's contemporary Alkaios and also perhaps Horace (right now I can't recall if he wrote any other poems in Sapphic meter). Furthermore, it seems that various Germanic poets made good use of Sapphic meter (Klopstock, Platen, Hamerling, Geibel, etc.), but my German is somewhat rusty so I might seek out existing English translations of their poems. Although the form has been explored by some living poets, too (including my favorite: Timothy Steele), I won't contact any of those writers until I finish collecting all the Sapphics that are in the public domain.

All the cool kids are doing it, and so are we: starting Monday April 23rd, we're holding a week long Swift hackathon! We will be focusing for a whole week on bugfixes, and at the end of that week release the first beta of Swift 2.0, the next major Swift release. Everyone is invited to join us online in our chatroom at swift@rooms.swift.im, and start hacking with us. And if you can't or don't want to fix bugs, we also need plenty of people to help us with testing Swift extensively that week.

(Thanks to Tobias for suggesting this).

Dodo's presentation on Δt (Dynamic Template) - drives the buddycloud website:

Dynamic template drives your channels. It’s a new and quick way to mark up pages and then shove events into them without overloading the browser.

More info: http://dodo.github.com/node-dynamictemplate/

It’s great to see this many applications for GSoC projects so far, but there are still a few days left to apply. So if you’re a student and interested in participating in the Google Summer of Code, head on over to our GSoC 2012 Wiki page and find out what projects are looking for your help.

The deadline for Students to apply is April 6th at 6pm UTC, so be sure to apply before then.

Realtime on the web is now a core component of many websites and applications. As a provider of technologies that empower the realtime web, we would like to provide our readership with a showcase of the best use case for realtime web applications.

We started small, but we hope that you will share your favorite examples with you to increase the showcase. You can see the showcase and contribute to it on Push – Web Realtime Showcase page.

Let us show together why the web is better in realtime !