Posted by Trejkaz
Fri, 23 Mar 2007 09:04:00 GMT
Today’s new version of Action Messenger makes things slightly easier to read when sending messages:
def prod(user)
recipient user.jid
subject 'Prod'
body 'You told me to give you a prod when I updated...'
end
You can send to multiple recipients too, just add them like this:
def spam
recipients User.find_all.map { |u| u.jid }
subject 'Buy chunky bacon'
body 'Do I have a deal for you!'
end
These changes have been in trunk for some time, however someone recently made me aware that the documentation doesn’t describe basic things like where the config file should be. This has been properly documented now, and hence the new version being pushed out.
Tags actionmessenger, jabber, rails, ruby, software | no comments
Posted by Trejkaz
Mon, 22 May 2006 12:16:00 GMT
Well, the first highly experimental release of Action Messenger experienced a small amount of success, and a couple of people spotted some bugs which have been fixed in version 0.1.1.
So now that everything works for small apps, how does it grow? I do want to integrate into Typo, and the default deployment for Typo uses FastCGI. Whereas each FastCGI process is relatively long-lived, there are multiple instances, and they can’t all be logged in at once [with the same resource.]
Read more...
Tags actionmessenger, jabber, rails, ruby, software | no comments
Posted by Trejkaz
Mon, 08 May 2006 13:24:00 GMT
Want to send instant messages from your Ruby on Rails app with the minimum amount of code and the maximum amount of testability?
Then say hello to… Action Messenger
Read more...
Tags actionmessenger, jabber, rails, ruby, software | no comments
Posted by Trejkaz
Mon, 20 Feb 2006 13:00:00 GMT
Well, it took a lot of fannying about, but I eventually got Jabber notifications working in Typo by taking the advice of people on the newsgroups and killing Jabber4R. It’s no longer maintained, so bugs crop up (due to changes in Ruby itself, I guess) and never get fixed.
I made a simple port of the notifications to use XMPP4R instead, which seems to be behaving itself for the time being. I ultimately should be using NetXMPP-Ruby though, because it supports TLS.
Now I just wait and see if Typo trunk accepts my patch and migrates to XMPP4R. Then I can unleash a bunch of other patches I was working on which integrated with XMPP4R. :-)
Tags jabber, typo, xmpp | no comments
Posted by Trejkaz
Wed, 18 Jan 2006 01:33:00 GMT
It finally happened: Google flipped the switch to allow Google Talk to join the public XMPP network.
This means that people who are on servers outside of Google Talk can finally stop being signed into Google Talk’s server, and start subscribing directly to their contacts who are stuck over there.
It also means that the public XMPP network grew quite a bit today, although I have no idea of the actual numbers. :-)
Tags google, jabber
Posted by Trejkaz
Mon, 21 Nov 2005 01:53:00 GMT
Well, here we are again with yet another 5-day downtime for Jabber.ZIM.
It’s a bit depressing to be the so-called admin of a server which continuously experiences this kind of downtime — we used to have such good uptime, too — but the reality of the whole thing is that a lot of factors stack up to prevent me having the control I need to keep the server running.
It’s currently hosted at ZIM itself, meaning that the odds of moving it to some other host is minimal (although starting a completely new server is something I’ve been considering for a long time now.) I don’t own the ZIM domain name, so I can’t just redirect the entries to point them somewhere else.
Next, ZIM itself is actually a virtual ISP, and the server which runs the Jabber service occasionally crashes (I guess BSDs aren’t as stable as the Slashdot BSD fanatics would like us to believe) and thus I become unable to fix it as I have no authority to go and do so, nor ability to sway the ISP to do so for me.
And finally, occasionally we get situations where the machine itself is completely healthy and the Jabber server is up, but the Internet simply stops routing packets to it.
All of these factors result in an awful lot of things which can go wrong which are all outside my control, and in some cases outside the control of ZIM itself.
I guess the question is… is it really impossible to move this to another host? ZIM would obviously have no direct connection with the server anymore, and we’d have to put up banners for the new sponsor, but otherwise nothing would really change as long as we pulled all the spools over to the new server.
I just don’t know how to go about begging for sponsorship for something like this. Maybe it’s time to start learning.
Jabber uses (using statistics from jabber.org) approximately 100 bits per second per user (outbound, slightly less inbound.) It would take, then, around 4,000 users to max out a 512kbit ADSL connection, and ZIM has/had something like 150-200 frequent users so in reality it would be using only the tiniest amount of bandwidth. Space requirements aren’t a major issue, though CPU and memory requirements may be. Overall the requirements aren’t too harsh, so perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to start prodding a few ISPs to see how they feel about hosting this kind of thing.
Then we just need to see if ZIM is willing to relinquish control of the server which has their domain name in it…
Tags jabber, zim
Posted by Trejkaz
Mon, 26 Sep 2005 06:03:00 GMT
I previously had accounts on all five messaging networks, and whereas I’m sure this is good for presence, it’s downright harmful to IM interoperability, and it’s hypocritical of me if I continue to partake in this kind of behaviour while telling others not to use the legacy services.
Most of my contacts are on Jabber anyway, so today I deleted all my contacts on those old services and notified them of my “new” address (which I’ve been using for a couple of years now.)
Next comes the deletion of the legacy accounts themselves.
Read more...
Tags im, jabber
Posted by Trejkaz
Fri, 16 Sep 2005 04:00:00 GMT
This just in, development of a Jabber File System for Linux, sitting on top of FUSE, which may soon be merged into the mainline Linux kernel (FUSE may soon be integrated, that is, not the Jabber filesystem.)
It seems to have been developed reasonably hastily and thus is probably still a bit rough around the edges, but already you can do things like this:
ls /mnt/jabberfs
echo 'Hi, how are you?' > /mnt/jabberfs/bob.example.com/messages
There are a few instantly recognisable issues, but they’ll probably be resolved soon enough:
- “messages” is just a file which contains all messages, instead of a directory where multiple messages sit like in Maildir;
- replacing the “@” with a “.”, which is going to cause name clashes here and there (bob.smith@example.com vs. bob@smith.example.com);
- no multiple-resource support yet.
But already, I can somewhat see the appeal of this. I’ve been wanting to integrate Jabber support into Rails lately, and to do that, I would normally need to make some kind of ActionMailer lookalike, where I run a script that connects to Jabber and spins around, creating objects in the database where appropriate.
This sort of trick would let me do that without really needing to run a daemon… well, I suppose the daemon would be providing the filesystem.
Tags filesystems, jabber, linux
Posted by Trejkaz
Fri, 26 Aug 2005 02:52:00 GMT
Skype are going to release a toolkit for adding Skype support to other applications.
They say, “This would create the largest open instant messaging platform in the world.”
I have some news for Skype. Giving out an API for a protocol which is still closed, does not make an open platform. If that were the case, then Windows would be an open platform as well.
If they want to create the largest open instant messaging platform in the world, they might try joining one of the existing networks using protocols which are actually open, such as XMPP or SIP, and perhaps focus less on these obvious attempts at one-upmanship over companies like Google who have the courage to introduce truly open systems.
Tags im, jabber, skype
Posted by Trejkaz
Thu, 25 Aug 2005 02:12:00 GMT
It’s not often that the big IM companies give out their statistics. I know, because I posed as a reporter a while back and asked them all what their usage statistics were. AOL was the only one to reply, and they claimed to have 22 million users on ICQ, 35 million users on AIM and 13 million users on AOL-IM.
So it’s interesting when you have someone like ITNews successfully gather some figures and use them in a story.
The figures they give look like this:
| AOL |
41.6 million |
| Yahoo |
19.1 million |
| MSN |
14.1 million |
The first thing to notice is that this AOL figure is a lot lower than the original figure AOL gave me. One explanation might be that they’re counting users with multiple accounts (e.g. users with both AIM and ICQ accounts) as a single user. Another explanation might be that this article is talking about just AIM, which they told me had 35 million users, not far short of the 40 million users stated in this story.
Another explanation again might be that their userbase is shrinking and moving elsewhere. Yahoo’s figure is certainly up from last time I heard about it. They had less than 10 million and were stressing about market share; now they have just under 20 million and are allegedly at second place.
I say “allegedly”, because people always seem to forget about QQ, which supposedly has around 150 million users, most of which are in China. If information about QQ is accurate, it is most likely the largest public IM service in operation today, counting purely in terms of the number of users.
The next interesting thing is that MSN Messenger only has about 14 million users. This puts it behind those two, which is particularly interesting when you consider that in Australia, it seems to have the vast majority of users. Just goes to show how skewed this sort of statistic is if you only count within certain regions.
But really, the most interesting thing is that the last known count of Jabber users was 10 million, which is now not so far behind the other messengers. This figure was obtained before iChat on Mac started shipping with Jabber support (which already caused an enormous boom in the number of users, judging from various web forums,) and was taken more than a year ago, meaning that the number has almost certainly gone up a noticable amount since then.
Anyway, to sum up, this article goes out of the way to say [paraphrasing] “the other services have 14 million users and up now, so Google can’t make a difference.” However, if you count even 10 million users already on Jabber, the numbers look a lot better. Google only need to capture 4 million users at most, and Jabber will have more users than MSN.
That’s good stuff, don’t you agree?
Tags aol, google, im, jabber, msn