Daniel E. Renfer’s Blog

Instant messaging programs need to support the sending of language information. I am an English speaker. 98% of the time, if I am producing something, it will be in the English language. I would probably go into the preferences of my IM client and set my default to en-us.

Now, I have been occasionally been known to say the odd phrase in German. I took two years of German in high school, so I know just a little bit. The rare case that I write something in German, I could easily change the language selector to German. This should be sent out as xml:lang="de" in the case of Jabber.

This would be good, for one, because it would allow us to file the messages appropriately w.r.t. language. Second, you could then get tools to sit between the message and you. Imagine that I am an English speaker for a moment. (Really stretch that imagination.) Now say that I am speaking via IM someone that has set their preferred language to Spanish. It would be easy to set a processor on my end to take the message I have received, automatically run it through a translation service, and display it to me. I would of course still want to have the original message available to me as well.

All these things could be easily done if clients routinely sent correct language information. Since this information is currently almost universally unreliable, it’s hard to really make use of it.

This is what that site wants me to put in my code. I’m not quite sure I want to do that. I would love to find a way to serve all of my site as application/xhtml+xml, but I have all these old quizzes I took back in my Livejournal days. I’ve tried to clean it up, but there’s just so much of it. I would need a better way to open and edit the MySQL database that Wordpress uses before I’m really going to get it all cleaned up.

That’s my clean up of it. It’s not pretty, but it’s a lot better, markup wise.

I don’t want to talk about my rankings. I don’t really know enough about the records of any of these people (politically correct term) to verify if this is accurate or not. All I had to do was answer a few questions about how I feel about certain current issues, and then rank my interest in those issues. I’m assuming the script merely matched my answers to the public stated opinions of these candidates.

This makes me think that more and more we need a RDF version of APML. The amount of good, semantic, machine-readable data is increasing all the time. I want to be able to link from my FOAF file a service that gives all of the data it has collected for me the ranking and weight of my interest in any given URI.

Once the service is in place, then would come the tools that let me manipulate those settings, and other applications that dump into it. We would just need to mint a URI for each of these issues. Then we could create a database of the candidates, and their relation to those issues. Once I have rated those issues, it’s a simple matter to pull together my interests (in the political profile) and the stances of the politicians, and do a simple match.

Oh well, the happy, shiny, semantic world will come one day. Until then, I will base my voting decisions on a simple CGI script.

I have some thoughts to write out, but I know I’m going to need more than the measly 140 characters that twitter will give me.

Right this instant, (as soon as it loads) I am buying a new domain name. There has been this long thread in the Jabber Admin mailing list about what name is best to call Jabber. There are several names. The web-y name is Jabber. That was the original name, and that is what many people know it as. The problem is that it is also a name of Jabber, the company. Being an open protocol, they wanted to have a disconnect between the open standard and a company that uses that standard.

The IETF-y name is: XMPP, the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. Very techie sounding name. My mother in law wouldn’t really remember that, nor would she want to say it, let alone use it. You aren’t going to win over people reluctant to change by making them switch from a normal word like “aim” or “yahoo” by making them say four letters. XMPP sounds great when you’re throwing together every acronym that starts with X for your resume, (XML, XSLT, XQuery, XPath, XHTML, XMPP, XForms, ad infinitum.) but in can’t be said in a few syllables, let alone be verbed.

[just bought name, more later]

The next name is of course, the name of the Behemoth. Google Talk. Google, in it’s infinite wisdom, used XMPP as the technology when they released their Google Talk product. Every Gmail user is also a Jabber user. This has caused quite a few sites shooting for the lowest common denominator listing the input field as GTalk address. Sometimes they try to remedy the situation by also having an option for Jabber. This make it even worse as now people start to think they’re two separate things. bill@gmail.com doesn’t realize they can talk to sue@jabber.org so they never do. I don’t like the name, or even the standard Talk name because I think it’s just kleenexing it.[1]

{back from footnote land}

So anyway, when I wanted to buy a new domain name, I had the choice between SpreadJabber.org and SpreadXMPP.org I didn’t think we really needed the Spread XMPP one. Anyone that knows anything about XMPP is probably capable of Googleing it on any search engine[3] and finding out more. So I bought SpreadJabber.org from Go Daddy. I don’t know what I’ll do with it yet. I’d like to put up some information for the average user on why they should switch to Jabber. Anything you got is welcome. I’ll also need some buttons designed. I might drop in a Wordpress blog for now.

I will gladly sell the domain name off to whoever can prove to me that they will be a good steward for 7 dollars. I know there are bot that crawl the web for good domain names they can buy and sqat. I mentioned the name earlier, and didn’t want it to get stolen.

I’m interested to hear what you think I should do with it.

My JID is Duck at Kronkltd.net.

[1]: I’d really like to get the term “kleenexed” and the various forms of it entered into the standard lexicon. So often you will see a case where a certain maker of a product gets so well known that the company’s name gets used when referring to the general product. (Google, Jell-o, Zip-Lock, Cool(Whip|Aid), Tylenol, and of course Kleenex) I say why not make matters worse and verb one of them to refer to all of those products in general. So start dropping the K-bomb casually in polite dinner conversations. Make them think you’re smart by using a word that none of them have ever heard before. They’ll tell 6 friends who will tell 6 friends who will tell 6 friends, who will realize that they only know the same 6 people and move on, but someone will over-hear them and know what it means, go home and Google[2] it and find this post, and learn about Jabber.

[2]: By “Google it” I of course mean going to www.google.com entering the word and hitting enter. I will not be accused of kleenexing the name of Google. I will verb it, but I will not kleendex it.

[3]: Okay, I couldn’t resist. I guess I am a kleendexer after all.