It seems I’ve been neglectful again and haven’t reported the outcomes of either the live Dev Chat we held, nor the result of the new RAM I was bought.

Well, first up, the dev chat was a great success, with a very full MUC and well over an hour of questions (there were many we didn’t have time to answer. The abridged transcript is available at http://www.kismith.co.uk/psi/devchat-210606.html and we’re hoping to hold another chat event towards the Autumn, when we’ll have the results of the six Summer of Code projects producing code for Psi (Yes, Machekku couldn’t keep away and has patched Psi as part of his project).

Secondly, the new RAM went in fine and my Mac Mini now lives again. Nightly (universal) Psi builds of the main development branch for OSX are now available from http://www.kismith.co.uk/files/psi/mac/nightlies/. Windows nightlies are somewhat more work to set up on a Mac but I do intend trying to set these up at some point; until then I’ll be uploading builds when I feel like it at http://www.kismith.co.uk/files/psi/windows/.

Categories: Psi
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Much to my suprise, a shadowy anonymous figure in the Psi MUC (who didn’t want to be publically acknowledged) yesterday asked when the Mac nightly builds would be back, as Remko can’t make them anymore, and when I replied that I needed replacement RAM for my mac mini before I could do that bought me some. The generosity was much appreciated and the RAM arrived at work today, so I’ll be attempting to get the nightlies back up (undoubtedly with Remko’s assistance) in the very near future (the box needs a reformat, since the old corrupt RAM wrecked things somewhat).

Hoorah for harware donations to support OSS! (Following this news, Remko’s told me that he wouldn’t say no to an intel mac mini to test universal support on (come to think of it, I wouldn’t say no to an iMac for the same reason ) ). Somewhat more seriously, this was a very helpful donation that’ll improve the state of Psi by bringing back nightly mac builds and that’s a good thing.

Thank you shadowy anonymous user

Categories: Psi
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Recently a lot’s been happening in the Psi world - we’ve seen several Summer of Code projects come our way, Remko’s blitzed through a muc implementation (finally bringing us up to speed with the rest of the world), plugin support is being developed, ad-hoc commands are showing the future of remote administration of the XMPP world, PEP shall bring us avatars, user tunes, user moods etc. etc. etc.

During recent days we’ve seen a surge in interest in the Psi muc (psi@conference.jabber.ru) from users interested in knowing what’s going on (and helping, which is great). As such we thought it would be an interesting idea to have a question-and-answer session with the Psi devs all in one chat room to outline what we’re doing, where we’re going, what the future brings and so on.

To this end, the first “Psi developers live chat” shall be held in the Psi conference this Wednesday at 7PM, GMT/UTC for an hour. Please come along and ask questions of us, Remko, mblsha and I shall be there, as well as Justin who’s still responsible for the Iris and QCA libraries which Psi uses. (7 GMT is 8 British summer time, midday on the West coast of the states I think).

psi@conference.jabber.ru
Wednesday 21st June 2006
19:00 GMT

Categories: Psi
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Two bits of news for Psi, both hot off the SoC2006 press.

Firstly, I’ve implemented (most of) the new options system we’ve been talking about for so long and pushed it to mainline. It’s all dynamic, which means there’s no more editing common.h to add a new option, then editing the profiles code to set a default and copy/pasting some code to save and load the option; it’s all dynamic. To add a new option now, all we need to do is set it in the code with PsiOptions::instance()->setOption( "options.appearance.emoticons.use", true);, for example. Of course, options are very little use without defaults and this is now handled much more conveniently. When the Psi exectutable is built, an options-default.xml file is saved within the binary with the application defaults (this means that if you’re building your own Psi, you can change the defaults trivially). On top of this, your system administrator may install a system-wide defaults file to override this - and to make this even better, it can be a partial config, so if the only thing your admin wants to change is to make the roster pink in the default profiles, they can. Additionally, unrecognised options are now handled gracefully, no more of the problems of losing configs when reverting to previous Psi versions. The last bit of candy so far is that it’s all saved the moment the data structure is changed in memory: no more losing options during an unclean termination.
It’ll take us some time to move all the old options across to the new system but it’s something to look forward too.

The second, and probably more interesting, piece of news is that I found (Jason in the Psi muc told me about) Snarl, which aims to be a Growl-alike system for Windows. Since I want plenty of plugins to test the interface while I’m working on it, I implemented a Snarl plugin for windows for prettier notifications (since the plugin interface is completely unfinished, this only works for the single plugin method I’ve implemented, incoming messages, but its pretty enough).

The Google Summer of Code is turning out to be a fantastic opportunity to work on some things I wouldn’t have had time to work on otherwise and I’m very grateful to both Google for putting up the money, and the JSF council for choosing my proposal.

Categories: Coding, Jabber, Psi
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