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'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....
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....