Serendipitous altruism

A month ago I published lbdb-fetchalladdresses-firsttime.sh and lbdb-fetchalladdresses-daily.sh, two scripts that scour a maildir hierarchy to records all addresses from the headers in the lbdb m_inmail database in order to feed whole maildirs to LBDB for Mutt’s address completion.

A month of running these scripts has revealed a few problems wich are now corrected with a speed optimization thrown in for good measure :

• lbdb-fetchalladdresses-firsttime.sh
• lbdb-fetchalladdresses-daily.sh

As I mentioned earlier, if you do not have an existing lbdb database, you should run lbdb-fetchalladdresses-firsttime.sh first. Once you have done that you can from time to time update your database with lbdb-fetchalladdresses-daily.sh who does the same thing as lbdb-fetchalladdresses-firsttime.sh but only for messages not older than a certain user-set age.

Nathan Fritz reports Lars Mikkelsen patching class.jabber.php to support Google Talk. Nathan is reviewing the patch and considers including it in a next release of class.jabber.php.

So we learn simultaneously that class.jabber.php does not support Google Talk and that it soon will…

When I open a chat with a contact from any client, I want to see our past conversation. Jabber server-side message archiving capable is what I need to really make instant messaging the tool it should be. Being a long time user of Dircproxy, an IRC proxy that does just that, I sorely miss it when using Jabber. Now that Google Talk features “Chat History” the clamor from the masses is growing for implementations of Message Archiving as described in JEP-0136.

Right now the only choice seems to be Datasink, an external component that implements Message Archiving (JEP-0136). It is theoritically pluggable into any Jabber server. There is a good recipe for installing Datasink along Ejabberd. But client support is lacking : apart from JWChat I have not found a single client supporting the functionnality provided by Datasink. As the author of Datasink says : “Datasink uses MySQL as storage backend. It’s been written mainly for having a chat history with JWChat as it can’t save to a local disk itself due to security restrictions“. So we can consider that anything else is a lucky by-product.

The Google Talk “Chat History” is not JEP-0136. But as a recent conversation on [jdev] about Google Talk and server-side logging testifies, the topic raises significant interest.

A discussion on the Ejabberd development forum mentions that “JEP-136 seems to be implemented [..] by Jabberd 1.4.5“. But I have found no trace of that anywhere else. Right now, JEP-0136 implementation is a wishlist item for Ejabberd. I’ll think about it for my next letter to Santa Claus.

You may have noticed that I have added a to the Jabber presence indicator on my personal web page. It is provided by Edgar, a sophisticated Web Jabber presence indicator based on class.jabber.php. To use the Edgar service, all you need is an image tag such as :

http://edgar.netflint.net/status.php?jid=jim@jabber.grabeuh.com&type=image

Edgar displays status fast because it splits processing in two independant parts sharing a database :

• edgar.php is a command line script that collects presence data into the database.
• status.php reads the database and displays presence on an HTML page.

Edgar is licensed under the GPL so you can download it and set it up on your own host.

I like Edgar and I will certainly study it as an exemple of a non-trivial implementation of class.jabber.php. But I shall continue to use my pathetic Web Jabber presence indicator based on one of the examples provided with class.jabber.php because Edgar does not yet display ressources whereas the script I use does.

One of the problems with my Jabber presence indicator on a web page was that the page’s presence was being sent to the polled account instead of being hidden. I fixed that and the updated code is available. The fix was trivial :

29c29
< $JABBER->SendPresence();
—
> $JABBER->SendPresence(“invisible”);

Although widely implemented (even Edgar does it that way), the “invisible” presence type is not XMPP compliant. JEP 126 explains how to provide selective visibility in a XMPP compliant manner. Of course this is less trivial. But since JEP 126 provides the appropriate XML snippets, I could probably do it the right way using SendPacket($xml) to send the raw XML. Maybe next time… Meanwhile I reported the standard compliance issue on the Edgar bug tracker.