Ok, how do people manage patch submissions?
I have those that come through the mailing list, those that’re sent directly to me by email, those transferred by Jabber and those that seem to appear from nowhere.

My solution from now on is going to be simple; all patches can go directly into the Flyspray bug tracking system.
Now I’ll have a ready list no matter whether I’m at home, at work, or on another continent, I’ll be able to see all the patches I’m neglecting.
Genius.
For small values of genius.

Categories: Psi
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Feeling a desperate need for a break from work on my PhD for a few days, together with a vague desire to see the parental units, I headed to South Wales for Easter weekend. While staying with my parents, my brother showed me a ‘cool’ feature of the new msn beta; Winks. For anyone as in the dark about this as me, they’re small flash animations, together with sound. They’re a bit emoticon-y, but appear over the entire chat window, completely interfering with what you’re doing. They’re a horrible feature.
Ghastly.
Awful.
Yet, my brother (about to graduate in Computer Science) likes them. Why?
The answer seems to be that they’re silly. This makes some sense, it’s a joke between friends about silly technology, rather than a useful feature. So this has me thinking; maybe we really do need more silliness in jabber. It’s a little like cartoons, you don’t watch them because they’re enlightening, it’s just a bit of mindless fun.

It’s also, of course, something of a security hole, which is why MS pulled the feature a while back, but it seems it’s back now.

All this, and, as Justin pointed out to me the other day, Psi’s about the only Jabber client now that doesn’t support xhtml-im. Am I the only person who finds their motivation to code comes in waves? I need to find some motivation to just sit down and code for a few days at a time, so we can catch up with the rest of the known world

Categories: Jabber, Psi
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The thought occurred to me earlier, there’s lots of quite funky bots out there for Eggdrops, for IRC. Particularly bMotion, written primarily by James Seward (a friend of mine), which I have been known to hack on from time to time. It’d be great if I could have a bMotion bot in a muc/groupchat in jabber, so the question is; is this feasible? Has anyone tried running an eggdrop tcl script in some sort of jabber bot? BMotion may be one of the most useless bots on the planet, but it’s also one of the most fun, I want one!

Categories: Jabber
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Documenting code sucks. It’s official. No-one likes doing it. This probably goes someway towards explaining why Psi is basically undocumented. Someone asked on the forums today how [s]he could understand Psi’s code, and my only response was “Use the Source, Luke” apart from having three capitalised words out of 4, it’s also no help at all. So, using my amazing powers of perception, I’ve realised that we need Psi’s source documented. How do we achieve this? If we just stop development until it’s done, 0.10 will never arrive (there are too many prophecies about this already).
I have a plan, however, a plan so cunning you could stick a tail on it and call it a weasel. Or possibly a cow, I’m uncertain.
In future, whenever anyone makes a patch for Psi, they can check each method that they modify. It it’s been documented already, great, if not, they can doxygen it, as they obviously understand the method, or they wouldn’t be modifying it. It won’t produce docs overnight, but it’s a start.
The hard part will be persuading people that they want to do this.

Categories: Psi
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And that is that, there isn’t much more to say, I simply have it.

I plugged it in, and it all seemed to work. The apple keyboard is taking a little getting used to, but having USB on it is nice. I now need to go and play with it some more

Categories: Computers, Gadgets
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It seems that apple hate me. When I’ve ordered things for other people, they’ve arrived reasonably swiftly. I order something for myself, and even the shipping takes over a week.

Shipment Picked Up PARDUBICE, PA, CZ 24 Feb 2005 17:00
Arrive Terminal LUXEMBOURG, LU, LU 25 Feb 2005 12:53
Depart Terminal LUXEMBOURG, LU, LU 01 Mar 2005 12:26

It’s not even in the country yet.

I thought a shiny new Mac Mini would improve my productivity. So far it’s just killed it as I’ve waited at home all week hoping for it to appear.

Categories: Computers, Gadgets
37 Comments »

After Hal recently got himself added to Planet Jabber, he suggested I do the same. So, a very short conversation with ralphm later, I’m listed.

The relevant

Since I’m pretty much a complete unknown, my introduction follows.
I’m Kevin Smith and I’m currently the property of the Psi project. I started contributing patches to Psi some years ago, mainly trying not to screw things up too badly. Recently, Justin Karneges stepped down as maintainer and I found myself taking over the position. So I’m currently project lead/maintainer for Psi.

The irrelevant

In my ‘real’ life, outside Jabber, I’m currently studying for a PhD in Computer Science, which I’ll hopefully finish before the year’s out. I guess no-one cares but my ego demands I announce anyway that my study revolves around multi-objective optimisation using simulated annealing. In my time spare from that, I also practise TaeKwon-Do at my university club. I’m also currently the club captain, although I’ll be stepping down shortly. I’m also too young to be this busy.

Categories: Psi, Web Site
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