My Google Trends

Google recently released a new 'Web History' service, where they log your wanderings through the web. A great tool, or a ploy to get even more personal data about you, this is a service Yahoo have offered for a long time.

Suffice to say, I won't be using it. However I do have Search History enabled. It logs your all your Google searches, and logs which results you click on, with the aim of getting better results next time.

Some statistics from that service (running since May 2005):



Yes, I am responsible for Google searches at every one of the 24 hours in a day...

Me, Blogging and Bookmarks

I have been in receipt of complaints that I don't post to my blog often enough.

Here's an idea... subscribe to my del.icio.us feed, or better, my sites tagged 'interesting'. I use del.icio.us for all my bookmarks now, and post there more often.

Not that this is a way to get out of posting to my blog... :)

Tessa IM, the Jabber client

jdev@conference.jabber.org, 29/9/2005:

[10:17:33] I think there is space for 1 more Jabber client
[10:17:36] In C++
[10:17:46] Like Miranda, but stable, and Jabber-only

Finally, a year and a half later, I am writing it myself :)

It's called Tessa IM, and no, I don't really know how the name came to be. But neither do Miranda IM, theirs :)

It is designed in quite the same way as Miranda, but avoiding some weaknesses Miranda has. Some of the most obvious ones are inflexible plugin handling, and the fact that Miranda only runs on Windows.

Although using C++, Tessa employs Lua to bring even more flexibility, and will be cross-platform, by having the ability to be independent of the GUI used. Although we are starting with wxWidgets, it makes possible people writing Qt, Win32, ncurses, telnet interfaces... quite limitless.

Although the design will allow for multiple network plugins, like Miranda, officially (for now) only Jabber will be supported. For this we will use gloox, a great library which supports more XEPs than many clients do now.

If you are interested in joining development (several people have offered help already) then comment here, email (mwild1@gmail.com) me, Jabber me (mwild1@jaim.at), or post to the development group. We also have a MUC at tessa@conference.jabber.org!

Google Summer of Code

Dear Applicant,

Congratulations! This email is being sent to inform you that your
application was accepted to take part in the Summer of Code.

Yay! I applied to work on gloox, a C++ Jabber library, under the hood of the XMPP Software Foundation as the mentoring organisation.

This project is important to me in many ways. Firstly I know I need to get back to C/C++ coding, of which I have not done much for quite some time. Second, my task is all about adding XMPP-over-HTTP support, which is currently my only way around my ISP's restrictions. Gloox is also the library that Tessa (my new Jabber client, more coming later) uses.

All this, plus the (much needed) payment, and being able to add this to my CV, all is good :)

I will be posting development progress updates to this blog, tagged with 'Jabber' and 'GSoC' (view) (rss).

Some other interesting projects I really look forward to seeing:

• Data Form Designer Suite for XMPP (Jabber)
  
• Jingle Audio/Video for Gajim (Jabber)
  
• Revision Controlled Home Directories (Ubuntu)
  
• Mouse Gesture Recognition for the Desktop (Ubuntu)
  
• Proposal for the Development of a Graphical BZW 2.0 Editor (BZFlag)
• Interactive Wiki Maintenance with Jabber/XMPP (MoinMoin Wiki)