Planet Jabber

Jérôme Poisson: Collective radio (with video)

2012-02-02T00:03:49+00:00

G'day everybody

after the shell pipe over XMPP, here is a new feature in "Salut à Toi": collective radio.

The idea is: you are in a chat room with a common playlist, and everybody can add a song to the playlist. The song is played simultaneously for everybody, making it a collective radio experiment.

So far, there are maximum 2 songs in queue, as soon as one song is played, anybody can add a new one. In the future, we can imagine a more sophisticated system to choose who can add a song in queue (e.g. each one in turn, with a vote if songs played are appreciated, or with a game: the one who can answer a quiz question can choose next song).

Maybe in the future we'll see thematic rooms: jazz, rock, experimental, discovery, song with nice lyrics, etc. Or maybe we'll spend some evenings with friends, each one adding nice songs after the other, or playing blind test. We can also imagine party were everybody can participate to the playlist.
If in addition you use it on your phone: you are your own radio disc jockey :)

Following is a video showing the current implementation of the proof of concept, it's in french but quite easy to understand.

For the record: I'll be in Brussels next weekend for the FOSDEM, where I'll make a demo of the project at the XSF stand; don't hesitate to come to have a chat :). In addition I'll have a short talk in the devroom on saturday evening (18:00), you can have more information by clicking on this link.

To play the video, you nead a recent browser (e.g. Firefox 4+ or the last Chromium).
You can also use VLC (>=1.1 only), by using this url as a flux: http://www.goffi.org/videos/pr%c3%a9sentation_S%c3%a0T_5_radio_collective.webm

Last but not least, you can use mplayer: mplayer "http://www.goffi.org/videos/pr%c3%a9sentation_S%c3%a0T_5_radio_collective.webm"

This video is licensed under Creative Common BY-SA

Your browser doesn't manage the « video » tag, you should update, e.g. with the last Firefox

Alexander Gnauck: BOSH prebind in MatriX and attach to Strophe

2012-01-31T15:09:12+00:00

Why prebind and attach?

When your web application is already logged in and needs to establish a XMPP connection you have a seamless and secure solution with prebind and attach. You don’t have to ask the user to provide the credentials again, and you don’t have to render the credentials insecure in your HTML output.

Prebind with MatriX

This code shows how to prebind a session with MatriX. On success MatriX raises the OnPrebind event and provides the Jid, Rid and Sid in the PrebindEventArgs. The Rid is the last one used by MatriX and must be incremented before getting passed to Strophe.
You can render this params in a new page and attach the session with Strophe.

var xmppClient = new XmppClient
{
	Username = "testuser",
	XmppDomain = "ag-software.de",
	Password = "secret",
	Transport = Matrix.Net.Transport.BOSH,
	Uri = new System.Uri("http://ag-software.de/http-bind/")
};

// subscribe to the prebind event
xmppClient.OnPrebind += client_OnPrebind;

void client_OnPrebind(object sender, PrebindEventArgs e)
{
	prebindArgs = e;
	are.Set();
}
// start prebinding with MatriX now
xmppClient.Prebind();

You can download a complete ASP .NET example project here:
Bosh Prebind Example

Jappix news: Jappix Mobile website

2012-01-31T09:17:20+00:00

Yay!

Today we are opening our fresh new Jappix Mobile (jappix.mobi) website.

It is dedicated to the future Jappix Mobile smartphone app. For the moment, it suggests the user some good alternatives to our future app (Beem on Android for instance).

Jappix Mobile will first be an Android app. It will feature instant messaging (both private and groupchat), social channel (instant sharing is a strong need on mobile phones) with picture attaching capabilities, and video/audio chatting. Our aim is to replace the whole old phone features which are SMS, MMS and calls. Our vision is that everything should pass through the Internet.

That's why we are looking for great and talented Android developers, who would like to contribute to a new Jappix open-source project! If you are interested, contact us on this page.

Vanaryon, Jappix founder.

Jack Moffitt: The Numbers Behind the Twitter Data Silo

2012-01-30T20:47:00+00:00

The dark future of search is being foreshadowed by this Twitter vs. Google fight. The latest Twitter volley at Google is this quote (seen on GigaOm) from Twitter CEO Dick Costolo:

"Google crawls us at a rate of 1300 hits per second... They've indexed 3 billion of our pages," Costolo said. "They have all the data they need."

There's no doubt that 1,300 hits per second is a large number, but let's put that in perspective:

In February 2010, Twitter was at 50 million tweets per day. This is just under 600 tweets per second.
In June 2011, Twitter was at 200 million tweets per day. This is over 2,300 per second.
In October 2011, Twitter hit 250 million tweets per day or just under 3,000 per second.
They have spikes of over 7,000 tweets per second, with the largest (so far) being just over 25,000 tweets per second.

For part of 2010, Google was perhaps able to keep up with the stream at 1,300 requests per second. Somewhere between February and June, the average volume of tweets outpaced them.

Let's assume that they kept pace until June 2011, and that on June 1, Twitter went from somewhere in the range of 1,300 tweets per second to their reported 2,300 tweets per second. Google is 1,000 tweets behind per second.

By the end of the year, Google missed 15.5 billion tweets. They are two months behind if they didn't skip any, and the tweet volume did not increase. But it did increase by 25% or so by October, and surely it has grown more since then.

If Google has only indexed 3 billion pages so far, they have approximately 12 days of tweets at current volume. It's pretty hard to rationalize the 3 billion pages number against the 1,300 per second number. Was Google indexing at a much slower rate before? Did they not start until a few months ago?

Of course Google may be getting multiple tweets per request, perhaps by crawling the timelines of important users. But this means that they probably get a lot of requests that don't give them any new tweets, or else the timeliness of the data is poor.

No matter how you slice it, it appears Google would be unable to keep up. Even if they were keeping up now, Twitter's growth probably sets a time limit for which keeping up remains possible.

Perhaps Google is super clever, and can index only the right tweets. I think that it's more probable they have "enough" data to surface results for the super popular topics, and miss nearly everything in the long tail of the distribution. I expect that this adversely affects search quality, which one suspects is a high priority for the world's best search engine.

Google is no saint. They are just as guilty of the same data hoarding. If you ran these numbers for YouTube indexing, I think you will find the situation is much worse. I imagine that most of these data silo companies purposefully set their crawl rates too low for anyone to achieve high quality search results.

In the case of Twitter, the end result for users is even worse because Twitter's own attempts at search are terrible and are getting worse over time. At least Google makes a decent YouTube search, even if no one else can.

Even if Google could get all the tweets, they still would have very little to no Facebook data. I still think the best strategy in this situation for them is to create their own social data and use that instead. It's a tough road, but they seem to have little choice.

In the end, it's not about Google or Twitter or Facebook, but the stifling of innovation and competition around data. We can only hope that some federated solution or some data-liberal company wins out in the end.

Tigase Blog: Tigase XMPP Server 5.1.0 Beta4

2012-01-26T03:57:32+00:00

The final 5.1.0 for the Tigase XMPP Server is around the corner. While we are running the last tests you can grab Beta4 build which is most likely the same exact code we will publish as the final new version.....

Please note, the download section has been moved to our project tracking system which hosts all our projects and is based on Redmine.

As usually any comments are very welcomed.

Peter Saint-Andre: Relaunching xmpp.net as a Server Directory

2012-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

This evening I coverted the information from the xmpp.org web page at http://xmpp.org/resources/public-services/ into a format that will enable us to use XEP-0309 when server software starts to support that protocol. Instead of using WordPress tables at xmpp.org, I now store information about each server in a vCard4 XML file, which is converted into an old-style services.xml file (disco#info format) and into an index.html file using shell scripts and XSLT. You can see the results at http://xmpp.net/.

Jack Moffitt: The More Things Change: A Review of The Soul of a New Machine

2012-01-20T10:20:00+00:00

Already in my career I've experienced enormous passion, burnout, extraordinary dedication to my team and projects, and depression. I'm sure many others have as well. Has it always been this way with technology? I often wonder if this rollercoaster is necessary, healthy, or normal.

I recently saw a recommendation for Soul of a New Machine, which tells the story of a team of engineers at Data General who built a new 32-bit computer in the late 1970s. The book is fascinating. Thirty year later, many of its descriptions of the project and the way the team worked and was treated could apply to any modern project.

The plot summary will no doubt sound familiar to you: A team of mostly young, mostly male engineers works grueling hours to build something amazing in too short an amount of time. They succeed, albeit a bit over their original schedule. Despite the project's commercial success, the team is denied both recognition and financial rewards and many end up leaving the company. Almost all of them ultimately enjoyed it and would (and did) do it again.

There were many pieces of this story that resonated with me.

Work is a Drug

On overworking Tom West, the manager of the team in the book, says:

That's the bear trap, the greatest vice. Your job. You can justify just about any behavior with it. Maybe that's why you do it, so you don't have to deal with all those other problems.

Why deal with the unpredictable world, when the controllable world of creation is available? It's code as escapist drug, and I love to get high on it. Mundane things like cleaning my house, and more serious ones like taking care of my health, are all easy to avoid while fixing bugs or starting a new project.

It's both possible and important to find a balance.

The team's secretary, who was much more than her title suggests, suffered and succeeded with the rest of the team. Even she says:

I would do it again. I would be very grateful to do it again. I think I would take a cut in pay to do it again.

Even as I recover from projects that burned me out, I am constantly thinking about how to do new ones. In fact, while I'm doing any project, I'm already thinking about doing another. This sounds like drugs again. But they are good drugs.

Harassment and Treatment of Women

The book describes how some team members tormented the lone female engineer. This is something that still happens today, and it's terrible. And people then wonder why there are so few women in our industry.

In addition to that, at the end when they hand out the peer awards, their award to the woman was for putting up with them, not for any of her actual accomplishments.

Betty Shanahan was that lone woman, and it looks to me that she deserved more than just an award for thick skin. She's the CEO of the Society of Women Engineers, and she was "a member of the design team for the first parallel processing minicomputer and manager of hardware design for subsequent systems." She later moved to the business side of technology, and I wonder if that had anything to do with her having to put up with the Eagle team's harassment.

How Something is Done is Important Too

Often we judge things by their properties, but one can also rightly judge something by how it is made. Shoes made from child labor are less good than those made in other ways.

Kidder, the book's author, discusses this:

In The Nature of the Gothic John Ruskin decries the tendency of the industrial age to fragment work into tasks so trivial that they are fit to be performed ony by the equivalent of slave labor. Writing in the nineteeth century, Ruskin was one of the first, with Marx, to have raised this now-familiar complaint. In the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, Ruskin believed, you can see the glorious fruits of free labor given freely. What is usually meant by the term craftsmanship is the production of things of high quality; Ruskin makes the crucial point that a thing may also be judged according to the conditions under which it was built.

By this kind of measure, is the work many teams do good? Is the Eagle computer that Tom West's team built really a success since the team worked much overtime, suffered divorces and other problems, and in the end received little to no reward?

I think it's time for entrepreneurs and workers in our industry to demand better. Our outputs will be better if they are made sustainably, and not just by the measure above. In retrospect, maybe the reviewers of LA Noire should have taken into the account the trials of its developers; it certainly would not have fared well.

Freedom of Expression

I want to hire resourceful people. I want to describe a general outline of a design and not have to describe it in intricate detail in order for them to build it.

It turns out that this is critical for happiness. If we're told exactly how to do something, it takes much of the creativity and fun out of the work.

Engineers are supposed to stand among the privileged members of industrial enterprises, but several studies suggest that a fairly large percentage of engineers in America are not content with their jobs. Among the reasons cited are the nature of the jobs themselves and the restrictive way sin which they are managed. Among the terms used to describe their malaise are *declining technical challenge; misutilization; limited freedom of action; tight control of working conditions*.

You must trust those you work with to be resourceful. If you don't trust them, you will end up micromanaging them into unhappiness, and you will also remove their valuable creative input from your product.

There is a balance to be struck with feedback. The Eagle engineers thought that the managers didn't appreciate their efforts, but in reality, some of this was them trying to stay out of the way. Kidder asked the Tom West's boss:

Had the Eagle project always interested him or had it grown in importance gradually?

"From the start it was a very important project."

Was he pleased with the work of the Eclipse group?

"Absolutely!" His voice falls. "They did a hell of a job."

But some members of the team felt that they had been rather neglected by the company.

"That doesn't surprise me," he says. "That's frequently the case. There's often a conflict in people's minds. How much direction do they want?"

I've had this same issue with investors as well. You don't want them to meddle with your company or your product, but you also want their advice and guidance. It's possible to go too far in either direction, but mostly you hear about stories where investors meddle too much. I personally think it's probably better to err on the side of too little help than to end up with too much meddling.

The Venture Capitalists

Even thirty years ago, the VCs had a bad rap. Tom West was asked in a Wired article years after the book's publishing why he stayed at Data General until he retired:

"You could do new products and companies within the company, rather than shag some venture capitalist and kill yourself for five years." To be an entrepreneur, he says, "you have to be interested in networking, even with fools."

This is another reason why I would prefer to bootstrap companies if at all possible.

Tom West ended up working on many interesting projects at Data General, but ultimately, none of them got the support or recognition they deserved. The other members of the Eagle team spread out and started or worked for new companies, and in general seemed much happier.

Final Thoughts

In the end, it's both a fascinating tale of heroism and creativity and a saddening tale of undervalued and underpaid engineers. I am both emboldened to keep following my passions and more mindful of its dangers. My troubles are not unique - not even modern. Thirty years after this book was written, I feel like it could have been written yesterday.

ProcessOne: Leading Analyst Firm evaluated ProcessOne in Enterprise IM & Presence Critical Capabilities Report

2012-01-19T13:38:45+00:00

Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Instant Messaging and Presence (David Mario Smith / January, 10, 2012) report by leading analyst firm, Gartner, evaluated in 4 use case categories for enterprise IM & presence.

7 critical capabilities like chat, presence, clients, archiving, interoperability and integration, administration and conferencing help to assess the different vendors.

Study assesses a selection of 9 IM & Presence offerings
ProcessOne believes study demonstrates the IM market maturity and industry leadership
Categories include internal collaboration, external collaboration, business process support and customer support

ProcessOne was recently evaluated in the enterprise IM and Presence category in an independent analysis, published on January 10, 2012, by leading industry analyst firm Gartner. This study complements other studies by Gartner such as the MarketScope for Enterprise IM and Presence published on July, 5, 2011.

As more enterprises use real-time messaging to ease collaboration internally and externally between employees and customer relationship, business processes are requiring more flexibility and real-time interaction, especially while employees, applications and connected things are fully mixed together.

A business environment, where all employees are connected through various devices, especially smartphones, is challenging for enterprises. Push notification tends to become extremely important as it enables processes to synchronize with employees again and promote real-time discussion and decision. This is why companies need seamless real-time chat and push interaction and it's great to see the top analyst firm rate and define ProcessOne in this way.

Jappix news: The point for 2012

2012-01-19T13:25:02+00:00

Yay!

Months ago, I announced I was stopping all my Jappix development. Well, I came back on my decision, and I decided now to code a little bit for Jappix itself. But my real motivation is to work hard to add new Jappix.com platform services (Jappix Me is one of them).

I have now the idea to create a Jappix Pro platform, allowing companies and organizations to get commercial Jappix support. Four offers will be proposed:

Jappix help (EUR 10/resolved problem)
Jappix full setup (EUR 50)
Jappix custom setup (EUR 100)
Jappix development (EUR 30/worked hour)

The last offer will be really interesting, both for companies (they will be able to get their own feature requests to work), developers (they will be able to get paid for their hard work) and community (the code created will be also added to our open project). This is a new ecosystem we really want to be created. It will make the project really go forward, and give us the possibility to make our activity a bit more "professional".

There's just a huge problem to that. We live in France. Well, French laws are not really permissive to this kind of work: we need to declare our revenues, so that it makes lots of papers to do (a looooot of work!). We still need to discuss about the idea before deciding to launch it!

Julien will soon open a developer website on Jappix.org. This website will help people who want to write code for Jappix join us. We know it is hard to get into the project - for the moment. It will be soon available at developer.jappix.org (soon!).

Another announcement is that we goal to release a "perfect" 1.0 version, so that now, every new released version will be 0.9.X. The next Jappix version will be 0.9.1. We still did not decided whether we will give a new codename per sub-release or we will keep Spaco as a single codename.

We also had many internal problems in the project development. I admit I did not listened enough to what others had to say. The reason to that is that I wanted to work fast, do what I had to do and release quickly (I have a life, apart from Jappix, I don't want to spend days and days behind my Mac screen in fact). There is a huge lack of communication, I know. I am part of this problem, that's why I will now give my best to go forward with what others have to say. Sorry for that. Again.

Some of you have noticed we removed the "Source code" tab on our Codingteam.net page, and that it is also unavailable by direct URL access. Don't worry, we don't want to remove any free license. We just have a Google problem which is indexing data that we want to remove. The development code is still available here, but you can also get it by downloading a Jappix package. We are currently working to remove that data on our repository. Then, the tab will be added again!

Let's talk about our growth, we now have:

About 11,000 registered users on our XMPP server
Up to 300 logged in users on our XMPP server in peak times
Up to 250 BOSH sessions in peak times
About 17,000 Jappix downloads
About 80 Jappix Me profiles created in last 4 days

More statistics are available here.

By the way, you may also want to know more about our financial situation. Actually it is pretty stable: last summer we though about a small monetization program on our commercial websites (for the moment only on project.jappix.com and mini.jappix.com):

We currently earn 85$/month (BackLinks.com)
We get 70$ bonus per hosting client we refer (Arvixe.com)
We get 100$ bonus per advertiser we refer (BackLinks.com)
We get about 10$/month (community donations)

We recently renewed our hosting, our TLS certificate and all our domain names for the 2012 year. Remember that all this money is received on PostPro's PayPal account and is only used for Jappix (mostly for hosting, we need about 500$/year for that). We don't withdraw anything for our personal use.

Well, now you know everything. Jappix is going forward, we're giving our best for that project. Remember!

Vanaryon, Jappix founder.

Note: now you can read my new blog available on my Jappix Me profile. I post lots of pictures I take, and sometimes some news about Jappix and XMPP. Julien has also his own profile.

XSF Google Summer of Code Blogs: Jefry Lagrange (Gajim) : Getting into I2P

2012-01-17T02:44:00+00:00

For a long time I have heard of I2P and I thought it was a good idea, but never actually tried to install it. Today I installed I2P and I have to say that I'm amazed by it. I was expecting a barely functioning app, very slow response times and crappy ported apps running on top of it. I was wrong.

The I2P router console is simply great. It include many apps, such as its own web, email and BitTorrent servers. I'm not very good at describing stuff, and reading about it's probably too dry. I would recommend anybody to try it first if they are interested. It is like discovering a new internet inside of the internet.

It is true that it lacks a lot of services, and that's why I want to know more about developing apps for I2P.

Jappix news: Jappix Spaco is here!

2012-01-16T22:23:29+00:00

Hey!

A short news to let you know we just released Jappix Spaco (0.9 version), which integrates Jappix Me support (when registering a new account).
A bunch of little bugs have been fixed, such as the image navigation issue with Safari on MacOS.

Have fun with Spaco!

Vanaryon, Jappix founder.

Jappix news: Jappix Me, a step forward for social XMPP

2012-01-15T10:56:36+00:00

Today, 12:00 a.m (Paris hour), we are proud to release Jappix Me, which is a fresh new Jappix.com project with a bunch of amazing features. That's really a huge step forward for social XMPP.

Want a short description of what Jappix Me is? Well, it's a kind of Web gateway of your profile for everyone. It makes your social channel public, your current position public, and your profile/vCard public. You can also use it as an image gallery viewer.

Want to use the same avatar everywhere on the Web (forums, blogs, ...)? Yay! Jappix Me makes it possible, each profile have a page called "Export" to get the links to some part of this profile.

Want to post new updates? You have to use Jappix itself, then it will appear in the next hours on your public profile. The profiles are updated everyday by our bot.

Want to know more about your privacy? Jappix Me is a Jappix.com service, we respect your privacy and we ensure no security leak will remain. You can also set some parts of your profile private, like the social channel or your current position. Your profile can be removed whenever you want to, or you can disallow Google, Bing, ... to index your profile.

Hey, I want to create my profile, now! Well, let's go

Vanaryon, Jappix founder.

Jappix news: Something special. Tomorrow!

2012-01-14T12:45:56+00:00

Yay!

Tomorrow we will release something a bit special, a new Jappix project. We can tell you this will be awesome, a great innovation for XMPP world a once again we will provide a solution to something really missing for XMPP users.

Tomorrow XMPP will be much more social, we promise you

Vanaryon, Jappix founder.

Jack Moffitt: The Potentially Dark Future of Search

2012-01-12T10:12:00+00:00

Twitter sees Google's latest Google+ feature, integration into Google search, as anti-competitive, and it probably is. However, it brings to the surface some real issues with the future of search and of data.

Twitter's argument:

We're concerned that as a result of Google's changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that's bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.

Google's response was:

We are a bit surprised by Twitter's comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.

People have been digging into the semantics of nofollow (see Danny Sullivan and Luigi Montanez), but there is a much bigger issue.

Google and other established and up-and-coming search engines have no real way to include lots of data in their index. It's easy to imagine that the lack of access to Twitter and Facebook data was a motivator for Google+ in the first place.

Lots of sites now generate enough data that it is unrealistic to crawl them. For example, Youtube has more new content every day than they allow anyone to crawl. Twitter is essentially the same. This means there is no way to index this data without special arrangements with the provider. Twitter has closely guarded their firehose of data, but at least they have some mechanism to obtain it. Youtube, as far as I am aware, has no such mechanism.

My team and I ran into this problem head on trying to build Collecta, a real-time search engine. Access to the data was a primary blocker for many features and product ideas, and over the too short life of that company, access became significantly more difficult, not easier.

Google can build an effective search, even a real-time one, for Youtube, but no one else can. Twitter can build search for their data, but few others can, and their data access policies can and do change on a whim.

If Google believes that microblogging data will improve their search product, then a reasonable strategy to obtain that data is to try and build their own microblogging service to generate it. I can't fault Google for trying. If I thought Collecta could have effectively competed against Twitter for their audience, I would certainly have attempted that as well.

Google, Twitter, Facebook and others are hoarding silos of otherwise public data. Not only is this artificially limiting the features of their products, but it squashes the potential for new and exciting search applications. The search services that have sprung up are limited to your own data, aggregate results from service-specific search APIs, exist at the mercy of data providers, or make do with a tiny subset of the data. I don't think Google could have built their own search engine if the Web were similarly hostile.

One could argue for requiring these bits of data to be openly available, but unlike the data of the past, this data is expensive to publish and consume. Most of these services may not even have a mechanism to publish the data, even internally. Simply receiving the Youtube or Twitter firehoses (and not counting video or image media) would require significant engineering effort, and the rate of data generation is only accelerating.

I think we must push for open access to data, even if it is costly. These data wars benefit very few. If things don't change, the future of search is dark.

ProcessOne: CEAN 2.0 released

2012-01-09T13:55:44+00:00

The Comprehensive Erlang Archive Network brings Erlang community a complete packaging system and a simple way to manage several installations of Erlang.
CEAN 2.0 comes with Erlang R12B-5, R13B04, R14B04, and R15B, for Linux/Mac/Windows.

More than providing binary packages, now we provide an Erlang development/build/package framework.
This way you can even build any other Erlang version you need and build your own repositories.
The aim is to reach a production quality level repository of auto-generated Erlang packages, using a cross-platform framework.

The most valuable CEAN 2.0 features are:

Provide both Erlang and Unix shell commands.
Build and packaging framework is now Open Source (GPL).
Ability to generate packages and standalone installers.
Work in cluster environment. It's possible to sync Erlang/CEAN installation on several hosts using just one command.
Ability to have as many Erlang version installed as needed.
Reliable package dependencies generator.

See more on CEAN web site (cean.process-one.net).
Please post any issue or feature request on our Ticket Tracker.
Use the forum for any kind of request or help.

Alexander Gnauck: MatriX XMPP library for iOS and Android available

2012-01-07T23:13:00+00:00

MatriX XMPP library for iOS and Android is in Beta status now. Both versions are based on MonoTouch and Mono for Android from Xamarin.

Using this technology you can easily port your existing MatriX based c# XMPP apps to iOS and Android and resuse most of your existing code and business logic.

When you are interested in Beta testing then please contact us.

The XMPP Standards Foundation: XMPP Summit coming soon to a FOSDEM near you!

2012-01-06T22:27:32+00:00

As you’ll be aware if you’ve been following the XSF’s mailing lists and chatrooms, FOSDEM 2012 is coming, and that means it’s also time for the XMPP Summit 11.

A rough timetable is:

Friday 3rd February – XSF Interop Day (Hosted by Cisco in Diegem)

The testing to be done is being organized as I type on our mailing list at interop@xmpp.org

Saturday 4th February – XMPP Realtime Lounge at FOSDEM, XMPP Talks at FOSDEM

If you’ve some fun project to demo at our stand, the Realtime Lounge, or an exciting talk about XMPP and related topics, we still have speaking slots available – tell us your idea on the summit@xmpp.org mailing list. Talks start at 11:00, and run through to 19:00.

Sunday 5th February – XMPP Realtime Lounge at FOSDEM

More demos of unusual and inventive uses of XMPP throughout the day at the Realtime Lounge.

Monday 6th February – XMPP Summit 11 (Hosted by Cisco at Diegem)

Technical talks and discussion for the participants of the standards@xmpp.org mailing list.

All this, and evening entertainment too – on Friday, there’s the FOSDEM Beer Event (Look for the XSF logo projected onto the ceiling to find us there!), and on Saturday, we’ll have the XSF Dinner – free to XSF Members, and sponsors are always welcome – and very popular on the night!

If you’re coming, join the summit@xmpp.org mailing list and make yourself known – we’re busy organizing hotel deals, speakers, demos, and so on there, so you’ll be able to get the best deals we can wangle and be ahead of the game.

See you all there!

Peter Saint-Andre: Two Koreas

2012-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

With the recent death of the dictator Kim Jong-il (replaced by his son, dictator Kim Jong-un), let us not forget how truly benighted these North Korean dictators are. Literally:

Peter Saint-Andre: XMPP Federation Clearinghouses

2012-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

Here's the problem: the traditional model for secure federation of XMPP servers assumes that the only policy decision required is checking of the certificate chain for a peer server. However, in some specialized communities (e.g., military networks, industry-specific networks or supply chains), additional policy concerns come into play (e.g., trust based on clearance levels or authentication methods used at remote domains, verified membership in a particular industry such as finance). Currently, server administrators might need to establish a connection policy and then whitelist peer servers that are within policy. Unfortunately, that approach is time-consuming and potentially error-prone.

ProcessOne: 2012: The year of push

2012-01-03T17:58:49+00:00

After many years building the reference XMPP chat server, we are now expanding to push as a platform, for ubiquitous realtime notifications.

First and foremost, thank you everyone, customers, partners for your trust and support during the past years. We would like to assure you that it has been well placed.

Look at what we have accomplished together so far, in your behalf:

We have built the most renowed XMPP server, powering a huge subset of XMPP federated infrastructures. Communication means federation.
We have been developing our own improvements to XMPP in the form of mobile and reliability related extensions. Mobile is your key demand.
We are hosting large XMPP deployments with exceptional scalability and uptime. Open source is shifting to managed and cloud services

We are now building a much more ambitious platform, the ProcessOne Push Platform, which intends to provide a self service, large scale, over-the-web notification platform. The platform is powering one of our new projects, that would change the experience people consume news, Upik, thanks to realtime personalized distribution. Especially in 2012 with the Olympics, the elections,...

If you want to learn more about ProcessOne Push Platform, you can join the live tutorial we will demonstrate on the 9th February (Webinar registration link).

2011 was the year of the emergence of group messaging, like TextOne, our prediction in 2012 is the year of push, as an ubiquitous realtime notification stream, coming at you, on your smartphone, computer...

2012 is going to be pretty exciting for us and we wish to build even more exciting new projects with you all.

We wish you all a happy new year, a great 2012!

Credits: Gare de Strasbourg, by Alexandre Prévot, under CC by-sa 2.0

XSF Google Summer of Code Blogs: Jefry Lagrange (Gajim) : Jingle Bells, Jingle all the way

2012-01-01T03:56:00+00:00

What have I been doing? I used the holidays to finally get some work done in the jingle_FT branch of gajim. It's progressing just fine. I would hope that before my vacations ends it will be stable enough to be merged into the main branch.

It would be a really good help if you check out the branch and report some bugs.

It is easy to do just follow these steps:

1- Check out the latest jingleFT branch

hg clone http://hg.gajim.org/gajim gajim

cd gajim

hg update jingleFT

2- Report any bugs you find.

Go to https://trac.gajim.org/newticket

ProcessOne: New releases: ejabberd 2.1.10 and exmpp 0.9.9

2011-12-24T01:09:26+00:00

We are pleased to announce the bugfix releases of ejabberd 2.1.10 and exmpp 0.9.9.

ejabberd 2.1.10

This release includes a few bugfixes and improvements. This is just a short list of them:

* Erlang/OTP compatibility
- Support Erlang/OTP R15B regexp and drivers (EJAB-1521)
- Fix modules update in R14B04 and higher
- Fix modules update of stripped beams (EJAB-1520)

* XMPP Core
- Fix presence problem in C2S after first unavailable (EJAB-1466)
- Fix bug on S2S shaper when TLS is used
- Prevent overload of incoming S2S connections

* XEPs
- BOSH: Get rid of useless mnesia transaction (EJAB-1502)
- MUC: Don’t reveal invitee resource when room informs invitor
- Privacy: Activate “Blocked Contacts” to current c2s connection (EJAB-1519)
- Privacy: Always allow packets from user’s server and bare jid (EJAB-1441)
- Pubsub: Add hooks for node creation/deletion (EJAB-1470)
- Shared Rosters: support groupname@vhost in Displayed Groups (EJAB-506)
- Vcard: Fix error when lowercasing some search results (EJAB-1490)

Check the Release Notes for a more complete list of changes: Release Notes for ejabberd 2.1.10

If you upgrade from ejabberd 2.0.5 or older, read carefully the release notes of ejabberd 2.1.0 too, because there were several changes in the installation path and the configuration options.

The list of solved tickets since the previous version is available on ProcessOne bug tracker: http://redir.process-one.net/ejabberd-2.1.10

ejabberd 2.1.10 is available as source code package and binary installers for Linux 32 bits, 64 bits, Mac OS X Intel, and Windows: http://www.process-one.net/en/ejabberd/downloads

exmpp 0.9.9

exmpp home page: http://support.process-one.net/doc/display/EXMPP/ or easier to remember: http://exmpp.org/

Download exmpp 0.9.9 source code package from: http://download.process-one.net/exmpp/

You can also check the ProcessOne Labs page: http://www.process-one.net/en/labs/

Ignite Realtime Blog: Spark 2.7.0 beta 1

2011-12-23T19:46:37+00:00

Dear Community,

after some more weeks of testing, debugging and developing, we would like to ask for your support and publish the first beta of Spark 2.7.0. Ultimately, we would like to move Spark to Java 7, but that is currently not implemented via the installers. This will change in January after an update to the lastest version von Install4j provided by ej-Technologies.

You can find the nightly build for Windows here: http://bamboo.igniterealtime.org/browse/SPARK-INSTALL4J-543/artifact/JOB1/Instal l4j

About Java 7: Spark 2.7.0 will run with Java 7. Please interchange the bundled JRE (located at Spark-install-folder\JRE) against a Java 7 JRE or use the installer named spark_2_6_3_12555_online.exe and install Java 7 as default on Windows. Using Java 7 will stop Spark from stealing the focus, when a new message is received.

Important Note: Oracle has introduced a bug in Java 1.6.0 u 25-27 that prevents Spark from closing automatically during the log-off on the Windows plattform. This is not Spark related. This affects all users that install the Spark version without an included JRE.

About file transfer: Spark 2.7.0 beta 1 is fixing an big bug with file transfer. Spark 2.6.x has an programmatic error that was making IBB file transfer very unstable. Tim Jentz deserves a big credit for finding this after weeks of debugging. Great job Tim!!!

Spark 2.7.0 will also move to a standard implementation for IBB file transfer. As a result of moving to the standard IBB implementation, you may have issues with transfer between Spark 2.7.0 and Spark 2.5.8 on IBB. This is an unavoidable result of obeying the standard. IBB is the fall back implementation, if Bytestream is not an option. Hence IBB is not the regular transfer method as it is much slower than Bytestream.

About plugins: There were large scale changes in the way Spark is dealing internally with plugins/extensions. All Plugin developers are kindly ask to review, if their plugins are still working. This applies also to Fastpath. Feedback regarding issues with this are highly appreciated.

About GUI: The Spark developers are only supporting JTattoo Luna. There are several reports that other skins are not working properly. This applies especially to Substance. If you are experiencing any GUI bug, please check if JTattoo Luna is also having this issue and report it.

As a general statement, I would urge all professional users to use the customizing options of Spark to get rid of Substance in corporate environments. The dev team may ultimately decide to remove Substance for 2.7x in a future release.

About Mac and Windows7 64 bit: The next Mac release is NOT secured. We are looking for a developer who can provide a Mac beta release. The integration to Windows7 64 bit is ok, but the flashing notification in the tray may or may not work. A tester and developer (MS C++ Code) for this is also needed.

The change log for this beta is:

~~SPARK-1465~~ Checkboxes appear bigger then normal since the jtattoo update

~~SPARK-1464~~ When user accepts group chat invitation, status is always online

~~SPARK-1460~~ No group context menu on a right click

~~SPARK-1459~~ Update to the latest JTattoo version (Nov 2011)

~~SPARK-1452~~ If conferences tab is hidden, then Fastpath tab is hidden also

~~SPARK-1451~~ Vcard popup is not always showing up on mouse hover

~~SPARK-1450~~ When network connection is lost, chat window cannot be closed

~~SPARK-1449~~ UNC Path does not link to folder

~~SPARK-1445~~ Selecting 'Start a chat' in a group chat room opens an incomplete chat window

~~SPARK-1444~~ Subscription dialog shows the id value instead of the nickname

~~SPARK-1443~~ Privacy plugins cannot be accessed if we log into Spark through the IP address of the server

~~SPARK-1465~~ Checkboxes appear bigger then normal since the jtattoo update

~~SPARK-1464~~ When user accepts group chat invitation, status is always online

~~SPARK-1460~~ No group context menu on a right click

~~SPARK-1459~~ Update to the latest JTattoo version (Nov 2011)

~~SPARK-1452~~ If conferences tab is hidden, then Fastpath tab is hidden also

~~SPARK-1451~~ Vcard popup is not always showing up on mouse hover

~~SPARK-1450~~ When network connection is lost, chat window cannot be closed

~~SPARK-1449~~ UNC Path does not link to folder

~~SPARK-1445~~ Selecting 'Start a chat' in a group chat room opens an incomplete chat window

~~SPARK-1444~~ Subscription dialog shows the id value instead of the nickname

~~SPARK-1443~~ Privacy plugins cannot be accessed if we log into Spark through the IP address of the server

~~SPARK-1442~~ JabberVersion.java uses hardcoded value "Spark IM Client" for version name

~~SPARK-1441~~ ContactItem in shared group - right click popup menu performs copy when move is selected

~~SPARK-1440~~ Bug in ConferenceUtils.java that can break smack communication

~~SPARK-1439~~ Plugins are loaded in random order - plugins with no dependency has to be loaded first

~~SPARK-1438~~ Avatars are not scaled in user login/logout notification dialog

~~SPARK-1437~~ Bug in PrivacyManager that can break smack communication

~~SPARK-1429~~ Update French translation

~~SPARK-1427~~ Default Appearance/Colors cannot be overwritten through plugin;Group-Chat colors are hard-coded

~~SPARK-1423~~ typo error in LayoutSettings.java

~~SPARK-1422~~ persist vcard may throw file not found exception when jid is empty

~~SPARK-1421~~ Application version and application name are hardcoded

~~SPARK-1420~~ The messages in the set status message window is not getting deleted

~~SPARK-1419~~ Chat room configuration shows wrong roles for which presence is broadcast

~~SPARK-1418~~ Update simplified Chinese translation

~~SPARK-1414~~ Chat window is not flashing when receiving new message on Windows 7 64 bit

~~SPARK-1413~~ Update build.xml to check for Java 7

~~SPARK-1411~~ Sometimes file transfer indication is not updated on the receiving side

~~SPARK-1408~~ Remove "#" character next to Accounts button on the login screen

~~SPARK-1405~~ Improved last activity recognition

~~SPARK-1403~~ Enhance ability to extend core classes like ContactItem, ContactGroup, etc through plugin

~~SPARK-1400~~ Update to latest version Exe4J

~~SPARK-1381~~ Group Chat - Actions/Start a conference menu: propose bookmarked room (if any) instead of adhoc (random) room name

~~SPARK-1379~~ Support for XEP-0147

~~SPARK-1326~~ Make tabs position optional: TOP or BOTTOM; make search input appearance optional

~~SPARK-1324~~ SparkToaster showing avatars in real size

~~SPARK-1313~~ Enhance ability to overwrite spark properties values through plugin

~~SPARK-1215~~ Log out doesn't log out, it shuts down spark

~~SPARK-891~~ Typing notifications would be easier to see if also displayed near typing area

The beta release also includes a new Smack library that is based on Smack 3.2.1 plus the following bugfixes:

~~SMACK-362~~ smack throw NoSuchElementException if the muc#roominfo_subject has no values

~~SMACK-354~~ Provide milliseconds in timestamp colum debugwindow

~~SMACK-353~~ Thread leak in the FaultTolerantNegotiator

~~SMACK-350~~ Bytestream is not working in Spark 2.6.3 from XP to W7

~~SMACK-349~~ Smack's IBB sends too much data in a packet

~~SMACK-348~~ Documentation error - broken link

~~SMACK-346~~ Bug in return code for rejection handling in FileTransferManager

~~SMACK-343~~ Make Smack jar an OSGi bundle.

~~SMACK-338~~ IBB filetransfer doesn't work as expected

~~SMACK-336~~ There is an empty element in a SASL response

~~SMACK-335~~ Need to set file size and name for outgoing file transfer from input stream

~~SMACK-324~~ Investigate SASL issue with jabberd2 servers

~~SMACK-322~~ NPE in XMPPConnection

~~SMACK-263~~ Set file info in all send* methods

Expect a second beta in the first quarter 2012 that will include the latest final release of Smack

Please report issues in the Developer Forum

ProcessOne: Introducing the Upik app for iPhone and iPod Touch

2011-12-23T09:31:37+00:00

We've created a new personalized push inbox for your iPhone and iPod Touch. We've understood that people want today is real time news.

Right after we powered on our smartphone, we are immediately connected. We are calling that, to be instant-on. From waking up, taking a bus, waiting in line, eating for lunch, having a meeting and going to sleep. We are always at a fingertip of a breaking news, an important email, an amazing post or even an incredible tweet. And we do not want to miss them. But we just want to be alerted personally in a simple manner so we can interact right after, by sharing, calling, posting, tweeting, whatever it is but reacting fast.

With that in mind, we've created a new personalized push inbox for your iPhone and iPod Touch. We've understood that people want today is real time news. That's why we've combined personalization with smartphone and identity with push capability into one single inbox so we can solve the paradigm of living news in real time.

Upik.it (You pick it)	= Personalized (source selection)
	+ Push (Instant On)
	+ Inboxes (Aggregated easy-to-read views)
	+ Identified (You only)
	+ Multi-device (Your 360° mobile environment)

So to summarize, it's all about your news coming at you, using the notification capabilities of your iPhone or iPod Touch.

We've designed Upik to be easy to use, fast and remarkably efficient for everyone who is testing it for the very first time. There is still a lot to do to improve the overall experience. But bear in mind that we are fully committed to shaping a new smart content delivery to help you reduce your information overload.

Easy to use
Fast
Efficient

Easy to use

We've added an inbox and a catalog so you can perform actions on your notifications

Get alerted to all your notifications with push capabilities
Scroll down your notifications just by sliding in your inbox
Add sources using the Upik catalog to stay in contact with all the sources you love
Custom your experience adding sounds per source or setup silent hours

Get alerted to new notifications

Scroll down your inbox

Fast

We've understood that you want real time news coming on your iPhone, with no effort and no need to browse the web. That's why we've included time-saving features

View instantly your notification in a cleaner layout than the web, including photos, videos...
Mute alerts but receive notifications in your inbox
Stay in touch with all your social networks and email and display them like a notification

Instant-viewed notification

All your sources in a split view

Efficient

We've designed Upik app to help you organize your notification flow so you just use your inbox like a "rubik's cube" and never miss key notifications

Navigate and read your sources with different views
Focus on your important notifications by clicking on the "blue ribbon" to read them later
Extend the source catalog by adding your custom sources by searching and/or entering the exact feed URL
Many more smart features are coming soon, stay tuned...

Sorted view by source

Read your notification later

We hope the Upik app makes you feel the notification differently and joins the brave new world of push content distribution. It is available in the AppStore today and works on all devices running iOS4.3+.
We are still in private beta so ask for an invitation on Upik.it launch site: http://launch.upik.it/.

For more information, check out our support center or contact us at Upik@process-one.net
Enjoy yourselves and give us your feedbacks on social networks.

Upik is powered by ProcessOne Push Platform.

The Upik team

Ignite Realtime Blog: Seasonal Greetings

2011-12-23T07:04:05+00:00

Dear Community!

Another year has passed for this open source project and various developers have contributed significantly to nearly all of our projects. We were able to finally release Openfire 3.7 and Spark 2.6.3 under Apache 2.0 license. The most important Smack library has also seen several releases and last but not least the good old instant messaging gateway Kraken returned to us. Some great innovations were presented like SparkWeb/Redfire, Websocks and Candy. I really would like to thank all developers involved by contributing code and all users and system admins that went through this year. A very special thank you goes to Daryl Herzmann who keeps the servers healthy and Wroot for outstanding work in the forum. I would also like to single out Guus der Kinderen for his insights in Openfire architecture and the release of Openfire 3.7.

Merry Christmas to all of you and a happy, healthy and sucessful 2012