TechProsaic

For those of you who are bleeding-edge types, Psi now has an RSS feed for CVS commits. This means that you can use your favorite news aggregator to find out when Kev, Mblsha or Justin check in additions to the Psi codebase. This is a good way to see what the developers are up to, and may give you advance notice of some upcoming features.

The items in this feed will necessarily be very technical, so it’s not for everybody.

More details are available on the Development page.

Discussion is here: Psi Community -> Psi Cvs Now Has An Rss Feed

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No real big news, but I have been reading all of the rumors.

Brighthand

Mobile Tech Review

Enagadget

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The iPaq HW6500/6700 is coming out in April according to HP. I talked to someone at T-Mobile and she said she was pretty sure they would not be getting it in April because she would have known by now. Not sure what that means exactly. Could I get the phone from HP and just pop in my tmob SIM card and it would work? Or will I have to wait?

The phone has great stats, but I’m afraid it’s gonna break the bank. Check out the radios–you have bluetooth, wifi (on the 6700), GSM, GPRS, GPS, and I think you can control the Hubble Telescope with it. CPU is reported to be faster than the H6300. Rumors on the net were that it might not have bluetooth but I have independently confirmed that it does.

More details: 3GSM World Congress 2005 coverage: photo review: iPaq Mobile Messenger h6500

### Update 2005-03-19 ###
I missed a radio, it has EDGE as well. Also, the length and width is almost precisely that of my H4155, but 21mm deep, as opposed to 12.7mm.

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Nolan sent an interesting email to psi-devel today. Very simply, he asked what everyone was up to. Why didn’t I think of that? Jeez. Anyway, I’ll tell you what is up this week wrt Psi.

• Nolan is close to checking in his MUC code for Psi. Woo woo! I can’t wait.
• Machekku, one of our patch contributors, seems to be cooking up some interesting things. His mention of D-BUS makes me wonder if he’s going to be working on XMPP-URI parsing support for Psi that has been discussed in the past.
• Mray and I will be working on the Psi Website 3.0 project. This is still mostly under wraps, so I won’t go into too much detail. Let’s just say that I’ll be delving into Drupal innards over the next few days.
• Google Desktop Search has gotten a lot of attention lately. You might’ve heard they released a plugin API the other day. Now, not only can you search your AIM conversations (yuk, like who uses that?), since that was a feature included in the original beta of GDS, but now there is a Trillian plugin. Go Trillian! Can’t wait to see you in theaters soon. Anyway, we gotta have a GDS plugin now for Psi. Some random guy jabbered me today saying he’ll do it. Got my fingers crossed.

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Prodded by some things to respond to on Planet Jabber, and some recent Psi activity, I think it’s time to pen another post. Er, type.

First, I’ll talk about self-censoring. stpeter brought up the topic recently and it struck a nerve with me. Why? Because I do self-censor. When I first decided to see what this blogging thing was about, I made a conscious decision to not talk politics. I was 100% apolitical up until my wife wore me down around age 24. Six years later, I’ve cultivated some pretty strong opinions. In fact, they are so strong, I was surprised to be labeled [insert direction here]-wing in one of those online surveys that map your beliefs onto a graph. As anyone who pays the least bit of attention to such things knows, it’s been quite a polarizing time in the United States and worldwide during the past several years.

But overall I’m a nice guy. I like to think that people like me. If someone dislikes me, sometimes I feel that I’ve done something wrong, and I want to fix it. This is not always the case, but generally speaking, it’s true. This puts me in a bit of a bind. Do I speak all of my mind, and really piss off 60% of the people who read my ramblings? Or do I self-censor and acheive a wider audience. Or at the very least, I have the potential to communicate with a wider audience.

And now that I’ve re-read what I just wrote, I have to laugh. I am the last person who would tolerate “political correctness” in that place > two feet from my computer. I actually despise the concept of it! Conforming for the sake of conforming. The most easily-offended person actually compels the behavior of everyone else in that society. It’s ridiculous and maddening. Here is a classic perfect example from one of my nation’s “most respected” and “premier” and “Ivy League” university campuses, Harvard.

Oops, there I go speaking my mind. See, I could go on for pages about that article. But…I won’t. You see, I desire for people to be interested in what I do. It’s a bit flattering. But even more, I don’t want people to be disposed to actually dislike the things I am associated with, such as Psi or Jabber or Flyspray.

I have however thought of putting up a separate blog, or perhaps a set of essays. Could happen sometime.

Wow, that long post had nothing to do with Psi. Ok, I’ll try again.

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Quoth the stpeter:

“[JEP-0027] is limited to PGP keys and does not support X.509 certificates, Kerberos, RSA keys, etc.” — I’m not sure this is really a failing, since a smart Jabber client could generate PGP keys for users and thus hide the hard parts of generating and revoking keys.

Peter, are you saying that if my company of say, 140,000 employees, has a PKI that is based on X.509 certificates stored in LDAP I should reissue PGP keys to them all? I am at a loss here. How is this not a failing? If I have a pre-existing directory service that contains encryption keys, I sure would want to use them to…encrypt.

I would go further to say that while PGP may be a good base upon which to establish a web-of-trust, how many people use it that way? The only people I know professionally who do this are security specialists. A rather small subset of the entire body of people I work with every day. (It’s a bit of a different case when I’m talking about my friends and FOAF–they’re all geeks like me.)

I like the idea of using the roster as a proxy for the web-of-trust model. It could work. But the instant that–what was her name–Aunt Tillie is prompted:

Please select the correct key:
  5B109954 2003-04-15 Hal Rottenberg
  436D3C9F 2003-04-17 Hal Rottenberg

–then it’s all over.

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On the Psi front we have great news. Justin Karneges, the original author of Psi, as well other notable XMPP related projects under the Delta moniker, has just landed a contract with the Portuguese company SAPO. While it’s great that he can put food on the table and all, it really means quite a lot for the Psi project and the larger Jabber community.

The contract consists of creating a new Mac OS Jabber client to what I assume will be a combination of SAPO and Justin’s specifications. The cool part is that he has permission to derive his client from the Psi codebase, and vice-versa. He’s mentioned XMPP compliancy to them, so I’m hoping that Psi will get up to speed there, and perhaps fill out the Basic and Intermediate JEPs as well. And XMPP URI handling. Mmmmmm, good.

You can read his official announcement here: Psi Community -> Partnership with SAPO, from Portugal Telecom

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Hellooooo! It’s my first post to Ye Olde Planet Wherein All Things Jabber Reside, so I thought an introduction would be in order. For the many, many, many, many readers (ok, two) of my blog who may be wondering who I’m talking to–click above.

Ok, that done with, here we go:

My name is Hal Rottenberg. I live near Atlanta, Georgia, USA with my wife and two children. I work at Hewlett-Packard, and the really short description of what I do there is “system administrator” in our IT outsourcing division.

I’ve been using Jabber for a while now. If I had to assign a date to it, I’d say since the summer of 1978 or thereabouts. Or perhaps later. Some might (more accurately) describe the time I’ve spent as “a few years”. I’m somewhat of a software junkie. Once I wore out ICQ and it’s bastard cousin ICQ Groupware (which was left for dead by AOL), I found Jabber. I then began a whirlwind tour of all of the Jabber clients available at the time. Most were immature, but I kept checking back. I tried pretty much every Windows client, several Linux ones and several multiplatform clients. I counted once and it was like 20.

I finally settled on Psi. I began to get involved in the community and eventually, after removing the competition, I became the webmaster for the project. I’ve been around a while over there, and like to think (don’t shatter the illusion) that I have a fair say in how the project progresses. My compatriot and the real maintainer of the project is Kevin Smith. There are subtle differences between us. They mostly revolve around the fact that he can code C++ and I am challenged to spell it. (That’s not really true–I’m an excellent speller.)

That’s the hobby part. While my day job at HP has nothing to do with Jabber, we do run an 80,000 (with 4 zeroes) user license JCS server from Jabber Inc.. (We do some pretty neat LDAP & AD integration with it too.) I try to stay abreast of what the team that runs that server does. I have also made friends in the group that has a partnership with Jabber Inc on some co-branded products that HP has spent development dollars on and sells as a service. On top of that, I have joined the JSF as a member, and I quasi-officially keep an ear open there to see where HP can fit in.

Ok, I’ve hit the high points. Carry on.

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