invention

I've set up a copy of Zimbra, an open source messenging server with a beautiful AJAX webmail and calendar client on a local machine. Planned a while ago to move my mail to an IMAP server with a nice webmail frontend so it can be accessed from more than one place, and Zimbra seems like the best of the bunch.

The setup at first seems annoying because they expect a standalone server, and have their own copies of MySQL, Apache, PostFix, you name it ... Then I realised you can run all this alongside your normal software, as long as you set Apache to run on a different port. I guess it makes sense for them as a company that's really producing a commercial product (they sell a Network Edition which includes non-free Outlook connectors etc) and it could always be repackaged as desired.

I also found that ejabberd supports multiple distributed servers with failover which is pretty cool, and I might set that up myself...

Now it would be really nice if you could have distributed IMAP servers that automatically connected and synchronized in a similar way, but that's a fairly hard problem. Basically I'd want to run a local copy of the IMAP server on my laptop, my local server, and a master copy on the mail server, so that if any of them are disconnected from each other, mail is still available. OfflineIMAP might be enough though (although I can't honestly believe that its actually a Gopher site!).

Was excited around Christmas to see the Jingle signalling protocol for Voice over IP through Jabber, which was jointly authored by Google and JSF people and is used by Google Talk.

Google also released an open source library for doing Jingle called libjingle This makes it even easier for all the free software instance messaging clients to get the spec implemented quickly, and they all seem to have started doing that. Now that Google Talk has also turned on XMPP Federation, this looks like a blast for open protocols to win the day...

But when I looked at the roadmaps of Gaim and Psi, it became clear that although implementations are there, it'll take a while for these to reach general release.

Finally got round to trying to build some for myself, and found that they actually seem to work quite well (at least on my local network :-)).

Psi's jingle branch built fairly easily once I had the right dependencies etc.

I couldn't find instructions on building Gaim with Jingle support, it seems like they are still working on integrating it (in the Gaim-VV project), and I liked using Gaim because I can do IRC, Jabber etc all from the same client...

So I found Kopete which is similarly functional and has Jingle support in their development branch.

Building this as an rpm took more work because on Fedora at least, its part of kdenetwork which is fairly big. Eventually got it working after learning a fair bit about spec files... (rant: lots of "HOWTO" documentation, not enough reference documentation...)

The resulting RPMS, SRPMS and specfiles are all at http://davidf.sjsoft.com/files/jingle/ ... of course I should create a proper package repository but that can wait for another day...

Had an OpenOffice.org building day yesterday. Up to four concurrent builds. My Fedora machine seems to overheat in such a circumstance and turn itself off poof! Then won't turn on again for a few minutes. Frustrating.

Anyhow the Windows build of ooo-build-2-0-1 now looks like its working. I tried to integrate the SIL Graphite OOo patch into ooo-build but had a problem building graphite 1.1.2 with gcc 4.

I did a complete build of 2.0.1 and m149 on Fedora, just respinning 2.0.1 to fix up the installs which have a problem with strip. Discovered you have to manually specify to use -system tarball if you want to build dictionaries, something we do because we've got our own South African dictionaries.

Finally have a Windows build of 2.0.1 after fixing numerous problems and restarting a number of times. So should be building out of ooo-build cvs now. Tor has been doing parallel builds to me there

Also have been helping Friedel who's joined the South African project to try get his builds going. A frustrating process for him, showing that OpenOffice.org's build system is better than it was, but still has a long way to go.

All 11 South African locales have now been integrated in OpenOffice.org and should be usable in version 2.0.2 when it comes out. Thanks Eike for the work and the news