Daniel E. Renfer’s Blog

Sometime last week, I decided that I was getting sick of only having PHP4 on my hoster that I was previously using. I liked using the host I was using, (particularly because the admin had neglected to continue to charge me) but more and more, I felt the need to be my own admin.

“What the hell?” I thought, “It’s not like I get that much traffic. I’ll just host the whole thing myself. ” I was already running a mirror of the site under a different domain. I only had to make a quick change in DNS, and I was running it myself.

That was when my computer died.

Something is going on with my primary computer where it won’t detect that there are any IDE devices attached. I have a perfectly good 500 gig new hard drive, but it was still giving me intermittant problems.

In the meantime, I have dug out my old 1 ghz. computer. I threw my hard drive in there and it was immediately detected. But it won’t log into Windows.

So Linux it is.

When I installed Windows way back a short time after I got this new hard drive, it overwrote my MBR. It’s a simple fix to restore this from linux, but it involves booting up with my Ubuntu live CD. Due to the aformentioned problem with my IDE connections, I’ve never had much luck using my DVD drive in my other computer. On the new, old computer, I logged in, fixed the MBR, and begun using Ubuntu again.

Then I made the same stupid mistake I’ve made many times before: I tried to upgrade.

It seems that without fail, every time I try to upgrade Ubuntu, it will fail halfway leaving my installation corrupted. I repartitioned my linux partition so I could save my /home directory, and re-installed Ubuntu once again.

I needed my Jabber server back.Installing Openfire under linux was pretty easy, but in order to get it to work, I needed my MySQL server first.

I had a little trouble getting my MySQL server transfered. I had problems getting the permissions set right. The second time I tried it, I was able to log in and see all of my precious little tables.

Back to Openfire.

I have had my Openfire database for some time now. It appears that at some point, they changed the way the tables were named. Instead of using jiveuser, they were now using jiveUser. This required stopping the server, dropping all the new tables, renaming all the old tables to the new name, and restarting the server. I had jabber back!

Next comes this site.

This was a pain. I got it serving the files, but it wanted to serve the PHP files instead of parsing and running them. Major security flaw. I removed everything, and re-installed Apache and PHP. It was now parsing the PHP, but it was bitching that it didn’t have MySQL support. I checked to make sure that all the settings were right, but still nothing. One more complete uninstall/re-install cycle and that was working.

So that’s where I am right now. The next step is to get Tomcat running and put Mycyclopedia back up. And from there on to re-writing it… possibly in rails.

Eventually, I will get my other computer working, and all this work will have been for nothing.

Oh well.

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.

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.

This is a test message I’m sending using Imified. I’m really sending this from my XMPP client. (Trillian) but I gave Imified access to my blog.