Tim Retout's www presence

Facebook and XMPP

So Facebook Chat now uses XMPP. And the Empathy development version has some nice integration.

This could mean that I can finally chat to non-Jabber using friends on a regular basis. It's been nearly four years since I switched from MSN to Jabber, and I think I lost contact with a lot of people. Facebook chat via AJAX is unreliable, and my visits to the site are quite irregular, so hopefully this will work around both problems.

I for one welcome our social network monopoly overlords…

Posted: 12 Feb 2010 00:29 | Tags: Planet Debian, facebook, xmpp, empathy | Comments (2)

Notifications

I've been experimenting with the python bindings to libnotify - the interface to the cross-platform notification daemon. The API is quite simple (although there's more when you start adding buttons and things to the notifications):

        import pynotify
        import sys
        
        if not pynotify.init("Test Notification"):
            sys.exit(1)
        
        n = pynotify.Notification("Test", "testing")
        if not n.show():
            print "Failed to send notification"

Then I put these notifications into a simple XMPP bot, so that I could send it Jabber messages and they would get displayed as a notice.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. :)

One problem I have with e.g. Facebook is that it requires me to go to their website and check a page to see what's been happening to my friends. Similarly BBC News.

One traditional answer to the news problem is the use of RSS (and similar) feeds in a reader such as liferea. But for information that comes from the Facebook API, Twitter, XMPP or email, I'll have to use a different app. Why should the user interface depend on the underlying technology?

I found 'yarssr' while thinking about this - it's an RSS reader in the form of a notification area icon. I like the way it tries to integrate with the desktop more than, say, liferea does - but I would prefer a list of new entries when I click on the icon rather than a list of feeds to hunt through. I suppose I could change it, it's in Perl. :)

Something like a drop-down notification icon list of recent 'events', with pluggable sources of information and libnotify notifications, might make an interesting diversion.

Posted: 25 May 2009 00:00 | Tags: Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS, rss, atom, xmpp, notifications | Comments (0)

New Jabber Address

It has been quite a while since I switched to using only Jabber (a.k.a. XMPP) for all my instant messaging. We use Jabber a lot at work, as well, and there are plans to set up an internal Jabber server eventually. (At the moment, everyone uses their personal Jabber IDs, which isn't ideal.)

I've been having problems with jabber.org.uk lately - they seem unreliable at times, although they're going through a complicated migration to ejabberd which should eventually fix things. In the meantime, because I rely on it so heavily, I need it to work now.

Also, I wanted a cooler Jabber ID, so I set up my own server. Hopefully, using ejabberd and being on a server with just one user will make things more stable.

So, as of now, you can add tim@retout.co.uk to your contacts, the same as my email address. The old accounts will be going offline as soon as I've migrated everyone away.

Posted: 10 Feb 2008 00:00 | Tags: Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS, jabber, xmpp | Comments (0)