We’ve averaged 1,500 downloads a day of Psi for years. It truly amazes me. We’re almost at 2.4 MILLION downloads, can you believe it?

I whipped up this chart from Sourceforge data:

This came out of a question in the Psi chat room this morning. A user wanted to retrieve a password which was saved in the Psi config file. We don’t use any strong crypto here on the basis that if someone has access to your user profile, you have bigger problems than your IM accounts. There was a Perl script around which did the trick.  I couldn’t wrap my head around that, so pulled in a buddy (Joel Bennett) who did the porting to PowerShell.  Here it is:

We do like the long release cycles, it seems.    Kev the project lead has written it up on his blog.  You can find download links on the Psi Download page.

I had an email in my mailbox this morning which I’d not seen before:

The domain psi-im.org (psi) is about to exceed their bandwidth limit

Now bear in mind this limit is somewhat artificial as I host the website myself and the quota was just a random number I pulled out of my hat.  But it was a pretty big number.  A year ago, we would usually run through about 30-35 GB of bandwidth in a month.  (Bear in mind, this does not include actual software downloads—those are hosted on Sourceforge.  I’ll get to that.)

We used over one-hundred-and-nineteen gigabytes of bandwidth in the month of July, 2008.  And that’s just for the website itself!  We do not host a single tarball, zip archive or Mac disk image on the site.

For the benefit of those on the Psi groupchat this morning (available at psi@conference.psi-im.org), I broke the stats down a bit, and I was asked to share them here as well.

Traffic by sub-domain:

• blog.psi-im.org 5.91MB / planet.psi-im.org 1.68GB (both point to the same place)
• flyspray.psi-im.org 8.75GB (our bug tracker)
• forum.psi-im.org 34.21GB (not too surprising, given our strong community)
• psi-im.org 74.97GB

Daily average number of unique visitors:

July 2008: 4102

Top Countries (by number of hits):

(Top-level domains .net and .com excluded.)

1. Russia
2. Poland
3. Czech Republic
4. Germany
5. Brazil
6. Ukraine
7. Slovakia
8. Italy
9. Australia
10. France
11. Bulgaria
12. Netherlands
13. United Kingdom

And last but not least…

Download Statistics

Unfortunately, I can’t get very specific on these as Sourceforge’s stats engine is down for upgrades right now (has been for a few weeks…grr).  What I can say is we generally average around 1,500 downloads of Psi—every single day.  That was as of a month ago or so but is very typical.

There is one number that I can get specific about.

Total Downloads

Now this number is actually low because it doesn’t include the release candidates and it may not include downloads in the last few weeks because of the stats overhaul.  (SF claims they are keeping track.).  But anyway, here goes.

Total downloads of Psi official releases (going all the way back to 0.86, released in 2002), only including the Windows zip archive and executable installer, the source tarball, and the Mac disk image.  Not including any of our unofficial contributed builds or the Linux distribution packages……drum roll please…

1,997,919

Wow.  All I can say is thanks to the loyal users of Psi!

Source Code Statistics

And by request, source code stats.

Jaykul from huddledmasses.org has just released the first public version of his new XMPP utility for PowerShell called PoshXmpp.  As I mentioned the other day, there is some interest lately in combining XMPP with PowerShell.  With Jaykul’s tools, you now have a basic Jabber client for your Windows command-line.  But more than that is the possibilities it raises for stuff like the example below.  (In PowerShell terms, PoshXmpp is a “snapin” which is a collection of “cmdlets”.)

Connect-Chat — connect to MUC chats: try “PowerShell%irc.freenode.net@irc.im.flosoft.biz” to connect to the PowerShell IRC channel. NOTE: messages from these come the same way as regular chat messages… you have to Receive-Message to see anything. You could Receive-Message -Loop > log.txt ….

The homepage is here, and the code is here (requires PowerShell to be installed first).

A user at PowerShellCommunity.org asked how to send a Jabber message using PowerShell.  There is a set of commercial cmdlets available from /n software that can do this (and a lot more), but they are a little pricey for the casual user.  As luck would have it, PowerShell makes it super easy to work with .NET stuff and I happened to know there was a few .NET libraries already in existence.  After reviewing what was available, I decided on Alex Gnauck’s excellent agsXMPP SDK.

It took a bit of work to translate the C# examples to PowerShell, but there was another guy at AG-Software forums who was working on this as well and he had an example I could work with.  Also, Alex was a great help in some troubleshooting.

Next step–a Jabber bot. 

So, without further ado, the code (script repository link):

   1: # Download XMPP SDK from http://www.ag-software.de/index.php?page=agsxmpp-sdk

   2: function Send-XmppMessage {

   3:     param (

   4:         $From = $( Throw "You must specify a Jabber ID for the sender." ),

   5:         $Password, # Leave blank to be prompted for password

   6:         $To = $( Throw "You must specify a Jabber ID for the recipient." ),

   7:         $Body = $( Throw "You must specify a body for the message." )

   8:     )

   9:     

  10:     # This function reads a string from the host while masking with *'s.

  11:     function Read-HostMasked( [string]$prompt="Password" ) {

  12:         $password = Read-Host -AsSecureString $prompt; 

  13:         $BSTR = [System.Runtime.InteropServices.marshal]::SecureStringToBSTR($password);

  14:         $password = [System.Runtime.InteropServices.marshal]::PtrToStringAuto($BSTR);

  15:         [System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::ZeroFreeBSTR($BSTR);

  16:         return $password;

  17:     }

  18:     # Set path accordingly.

  19:     $assemblyPath = $(resolve-path $profiledir\Assemblies\agsXMPP.dll)

  20:     [void][reflection.assembly]::LoadFrom( $assemblyPath )

  21:     $jidSender         = New-Object agsxmpp.jid( $From )

  22:     $jidReceiver     = New-Object agsxmpp.jid ( $To )

  23:     $xmppClient     = New-Object agsxmpp.XmppClientConnection( $jidSender.Server )

  24:     $Message         = New-Object agsXMPP.protocol.client.Message( $jidReceiver, $Body )

  25:     

  26:     # The following switches may assist in troubleshooting connection issues.

  27:     # If SSL and StartTLS are disabled, then you can use a network sniffer to inspect the XML

  28:     #$xmppClient.UseSSL                     = $FALSE

  29:     #$xmppClient.UseStartTLS                 = $FALSE

  30:     

  31:     # Since this function is only used to send a message, we don't care about doing the 

  32:     # normal discovery and requesting a roster.  Leave disabled to quicken the login period.

  33:     $xmppClient.AutoAgents                     = $FALSE

  34:     $xmppClient.AutoRoster                     = $FALSE

  35:     

  36:     # Use SRV lookups to determine correct XMPP server if different from the server

  37:     # portion of your JID.  e.g. user@gmail.com, the server is really talk.google.com

  38:     $xmppClient.AutoResolveConnectServer     = $TRUE

  39:     if ( !$password ) { $password = Read-HostMasked }

  40:     

  41:     # Open connection, then wait for it to be authenticated

  42:     $xmppClient.Open( $jidSender.User, $Password )

  43:         while ( !$xmppClient.Authenticated ) {

  44:             Write-Verbose $xmppClient.XmppConnectionState

  45:             Start-Sleep 1

  46:         }

  47:     # If server disconnects you, try enabling this

  48:     #$xmppClient.SendMyPresence()

  49:     $xmppClient.Send( $Message )

  50:     # Send is asynchronous, so we must wait a second before closing the connection

  51:     Start-Sleep 1

  52:     $xmppClient.Close()

  53: }

/n software has a PowerShell snapin (a set of cmdlets) called NetCmdlets that I’ve been meaning to check out for some time but never got around to it.  Well, today I needed to do some FTP stuff in PowerShell and I didn’t feel like messing with Sapien’s free FTP COM object as it seemed a bit clunky.  I’ve had this NetCmdlets license offer sitting on my desk for a few months so I went ahead and took the plunge. 

I don’t have much to say about them yet except to say it looks really comprehensive.  They charge $99, but you sysadmins out there might want to justify purchasing it if you are getting into using PowerShell to manage your systems.  One really cool thing about these is that it’s all about manipulating many standards-based protocols.  That means cross-platform support.  Oh, and it does XMPP too, niiiice.  (Cross-posting to Planet Jabber… )

Here’s a blurb from their website and the readme:

The /n software NetCmdlets extend the features of Microsoft Windows PowerShell with a broad range of network management and messaging capabilities. The current release contains more than 30 Cmdlets providing access to network and host protocols such as SNMP, LDAP, DNS, Syslog, HTTP, WebDav, FTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, Rexec/RShell, Telnet, and more.

Networking Tools for IT Professionals

The current package contains the following Cmdlets:

• [get/set]-snmp : Command-line SNMP Management capabilities.  Manage network devices directly from PowerShell.
• [get/send]-trap : Monitor and send SNMP Traps.
• [invoke]-ssh : Secure Shell enabled remote access Cmdlet
• [invoke]-rexec : Remote execution via Rexec
• [invoke]-rshell : Remote execution via Rshell
• [get/set]-ftp : FTP file transfer capabilities with advanced proxy and firewall support.
• [get/set]-ldap : Access Active Directory or OpenLDAP servers through LDAP directory access
• [get/send]-udp : Send and receive UDP datagrams. Send Wake On LAN requests.
• [get/send]-nntp : Command-line newsgroup browsing.  Monitor newsgroup postings and post messages to newgroup servers directly from PowerShell.
• [get/send]-syslog : Syslog server and client for LAN event monitoring and reporting.
• [get/set]-tftp : TFTP file transfer Cmdlet.
• [convert]-data : Encoding and decoding utilities including Base64, SHA1, MD5, BinHex, and more.
• [read/write]-zip : Compressions and decompression Cmdlet supporting Zip, Tar, GZip, and Jar.
• [get/set]-webdav : WebDav client Cmdlet.
• [get]-http : Web client Cmdlet with advanced proxy and firewall capabilities.
• [get]-packet : Monitor network interface traffic.
• [get]-time : Access network time servers and synchronize machine clocks.
• [get]-rss : RSS client Cmdlet enables retrieval of RSS Syndicated content.
• [get]-whois : Domain name Whois lookup.
• [send]-im : Send Jabber(XMPP) Instant messages.
• [send]-sms : Send SMS(SMPP) instant messages
• [send]-ping : Network ping capability to monitor device availability.
• [get]-trace : Traceroute Cmdlet for determining the path of network packets between hosts.
• [get/set]-ras : Cmdlets for RAS connectivity.
• [send]-email : Send HTML emails with file attachments, supports SSL.
• [get/set]-imap : Retrieve and manage messages, mailboxes and users in an IMAP server.
• [get]-pop : Retrieve and manage messages in a POP server.

Happy PowerShelling!  (And don’t forget to check out the podcast I co-host, PowerScripting Podcast.)

Psi or Spark, who can withstand stpeter’s 1500-user roster?

Tune in soon to get the results!! 

Just came across this on ye blogosphere.  I haven’t yet tried logging into my other XMPP accounts, but it does let you specify a full JID so I’m assuming it will allow this, despite the Google Talk label.

Feature-wise it looks pretty cool.  The GUI is better than most IM clients I’ve seen on Windows Mobile, but not that flashy.  Not sure what to think about the VOIP, I see no evidence of these in the GUI.  Oops, spoke too soon, I see “call” there now.  Neat.  I don’t have many contacts to test it with however.  Add halr9000@gmail.com to your roster and let’s test it out.   

“OctroTalk is currently in BETA, and is available for download. The current download will expire on March31st, 2007.”

Darn, it’s not freeware. 

Here’s the canned bit from their website:

OctroTalk. Mobile Instant Messaging with full voice integration. This always-on product keeps you connected with your buddies, and your buddies reach you whenever, wherever. Works seamlessly over GPRS/EDGE/CDMA/Wifi/Bluetooth data connections, and cuts down your phone bills. OctroTalk now supports GoogleTalk, MSN, AIM, ICQ and Yahoo.

Features:

• Always on connected to Google Talk with MSN, AIM, ICQ and Yahoo transports
• Complete VOIP product. Access to PSTN coming soon.
• Supports Low Bandwidth Codec (even works with EDGE/GPRS/CDMA).
• Streamlined UI. Optimized for one-handed operation. Today Screen on Pocket PC. Home Screen support for Smartphone.
• Low CPU usage. Only VOIP product that works on Treo 700w (300 MHz processor).
• Secure and Encrypted connection to GoogleTalk. Google Talk messages are encrypted using industry standard TLS/SSL.
• Message Archiving in your GMail Account.
• BOTs coming soon. Access your computer remotely.

And some screenshots from the manual:

A loyal Psi user asked for a button he could use on his site to link to the Psi download page. I had a copy of the new Psi icon that Jason Kim whipped up, so I put something together. If you want to put something like this on your site, the HTML code is below the image.

<a href="http://psi-im.org/download"
  title="Click here to download Psi!">
<img src="http://psi-im.org/media/download-psi.png"/></a>

The server upon which the Psi website (and this blog) sits will be down for maintenance at times tonight between 8pm and 3am EDT (UTC-4). Sorry for the inconvenience.

## Update @ 0921 ##

Just wanted to let you all know that my partner-admin is a jerk. He went ahead and did the maintenance _this_ morning. “Because he was up”, he said.

So anyway…nevermind! Apparently the maintenance went well. Server might even be faster now.

As seen on JDEV today, Peter has forwarded a discussion that happened on the microformats.org mailing list to the Jabber community. Apparently this dude in the MF camp heard that the Adium project was working on standardizing an IM chat log format that *gasp* didn’t use microformats! (Melodrama mine.) Of course in the Jabber world we would do it in XML and just define a common set of terms and publish it as a JEP. Happens all the time.

I’m sorry, I don’t get where these MF guys are going. It seems to me that they are trying to make the web more semantic. Fine and good. Took me a while to grok and then find a concrete example. Here’s a draft spec for “adr” or physical address information.

<div class="adr">
 <div class="street-address">665 3rd St.</div>
 <div class="extended-address">Suite 207</div>
 <span class="locality">San Francisco</span>,
 <span class="region">CA</span>
 <span class="postal-code">94107</span>
 <div class="country-name">U.S.A.</div>
</div>

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this just a superfluous layer of XHTML on top of XML? What they have done is set up a straw man argument–a world in which XML does not exist–and declared there is a problem that they must solve by “building upon existing and widely adopted standards“.

Some other choice marketing-speak used on the site:

Designed for humans first and machines second

highly correlated with semantic XHTML

[using principles of] modularity / embeddability

All of these things perfectly describe XML. They go on to say what Microformats are not, and essentially you can translate the statements as “not XML”. So which is it guys?

Let me provide an equivalent XML (XMPP actually) example:

    <ADR>
      <WORK/>
      <EXTADD>Suite 600</EXTADD>
      <STREET>1899 Wynkoop Street</STREET>
      <LOCALITY>Denver</LOCALITY>
      <REGION>CO</REGION>
      <PCODE>80202</PCODE>
      <CTRY>USA</CTRY>
    </ADR>

Ok. Does the above semantically describe a physical address? Is it easily parseable by both humans and machines? Is it a simple? Built on existing standard? An open way to think about data? It’s even less to type!

You just gotta love standards. There are so freakin’ many to choose from!

I went ahead and added myself to Qunu and using the jabber service gave it a list of tags on which I consider myself an ‘expert’. Over the past few days I’ve had several invites popup in Psi. I accepted three so far today. The topics requested were Outlook, Firefox and XMPP. The experience was very good for me. I can only assume the user who asked the questions got something out of it because I don’t know if I can view my ratings yet.

As you can see below, its very straightforward. You are invited to a groupchat as if this were any other random chat you wanted to start.

BTW I have interviewed the three guys working on this project, I’ll be publishing that soon.

Check out some news on the Psi front: What we’re doing – Psi Forum

Also, I haven’t seen anything else about this, maybe they want it hush-hush. Oh well. As recently blogged by Justin Kirby, Qunu is an expert matching service. You’ve seen these before, Yahoo and Google and several smaller companies during the dotcom bubble tried their hand at it. The premise is to provide a place for people to ask questions, and then pay a modest amount for someone to come up with the answer. Its like IT consulting on a tiny scale. Of course, the subject could be anything, doesn’t have to be technology-related at all. Qunu takes this model but brings it into the instant world we live in today. So you ask a question, and through some magic on the back end, you are matched up with an expert in the subject–in live chat. How is this different from a livechat thing on hundreds of corporate websites already? The experts aren’t employees–they are you and me. Yes, the back end users Jabber. Duh. It would be pretty boring to me if it didn’t!

I don’t actually know many details at this point, but I plan on digging. You can try it yourself, too. Here’s a quote from Justin’s blog:

* Use the site at alpha.qunu.com. This is simply a custom jabber client via html and javascript.
* Register with quser.alpha.qunu.com
* Add quser.alpha.qunu.com to your roster via a subscribe request
* Add quser@qunu.com to your roster

/me goes to create a Qunu profile.

Sabifoo :: Instant Possibility
You can instantly create your own Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed and post things to the Web just by sending a message with your present instant messaging account. Publishing your greetings to the world is as simple as saying “Hello!”

Sabifoo is essentially a bot that posts everything you say as an item in your very own RSS feed. It supports IM systems other than XMPP, but I’ll quietly pretend it doesn’t.

I can see using this for a shoutbox on my blog…hmm…

Quick note to let you all know that I have fixed a little itty bitty bug (the files weren’t there).

I’m happy to (re)announce that Planet Psi is now online. Planet Psi is a developer’s blog, not a general blog about Jabber, nor a community site like the Psi Forums.

Members of the blog aggregate are:

• Hal Rottenberg (feed)
• Justin Karneges (feed)
• Kevin Smith (feed)
• Michail Pishchagin (feed)
• Remko Tronçon (feed)

You should note that the above feeds are actually unique to Planet Psi and do not necessarily appear on Planet Jabber. (The article you are now reading was intentionally cross-posted.) So check us out over there if you would like a different perspective.

I thought I’d make a quick post on how to use Psi’s new Execute Command feature. This is an implementation of JEP-0146: Remote Controlling Clients, which is a document which describes a profile of Ad-Hoc Commands.

First, you have to be logged in twice. It could be two logins from the same computer, but that’s not very useful now is it? In this example I’m going to remotely control my home instance of Psi from my work laptop.

So, find yourself in your roster. Your “self-contact” will be at the top, right under the account name. Note that unlike previous versions of Psi, this self-contact will appear automatically whenever it detects multiple resources logged in. (It goes away if you are only logged in from one client.) Right click on that bad boy and you’ll see the options below:

Choose your other resource, and you’ll see a window like this one below. In 0.11-beta2 there is only the one command available, although the development branch and subsequent releases will have several other features.

Here is what the Set Status command looks like. I think the usage is pretty self-explanatory.

Summary of changes:

* Privacy Lists (Required for XMPP / aka RFC 3921)
* Ad-Hoc Commands (JEP-0050)
* Remote Control (JEP-0145)
* PEP (JEP-0163)

Go grab it!

Thanks a bunch to Kev, Remko, Mblsha and Justin for working so hard on this.

As mentioned by Remko and St. Pete, we’ve made some changes to the Psi Roadmap. I’m really excited that we’re going to get XMPP compliance soon! Some of you will know that Justin Karneges was the original author of Psi but he stepped down as an active project member some time ago. What you may not know is that his day job allows for him to continue work on jabber related stuff. He’s still working on Iris, the QT Jabber (or we can soon say XMPP) library that we use for Psi. So the backend work is still done by Justin, and then the frontend more “visible” client stuff is what Remko, Mblsha, Kev and our other volunteers work on.

So Psi 0.11 is really going to be cool, can’t wait.

Remko’s Post

Road Map – PsiWiki

Yes! They are bringing Jabber support back! I haven’t done any testing yet, wife’s got my phone and won’t give it back. Agile is one of the best IM clients on Windows Mobile (aka Windows CE), but they went commercial and dropped jabber support some time ago. An older version was floating around available as freeware, but it doesn’t play very nice with Windows Mobile 5. Can’t wait to test this out.

(thx PocketPC Thoughts)

Pocket PC Thoughts – Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

After a painstaking wait and increasing pressure from the online communities, Agile Mobile has finally graced us with a public alpha version of their newly redesigned multi-instant messaging client, Agile Messenger. With full support for Windows Mobile 5, landscape mode, chat history, and its original features we have come to appreciate such as “push-to-talk” audio chat, this new version of Agile Messenger is sure to make its way into many mobile devices when it’s finally released.