Older blog entries for dgh (starting at number 22)

25 Feb 2009 (updated 25 Feb 2009 at 20:09 UTC) »

Jingle interoperability day

Before FOSDEM this year, a bunch of people got together to test our various Jingle implementations with each other. Attendance was great: I think we had representatives from most implementations, and we almost ran out of chairs.


Paul Witty from Tandberg and Sjoerd from Collabora, testing Jingle calls to a Tandberg video conferencing endpoint.

I'd judge the event a great success: we found a number of bugs and even fixed some of them the same day. In particular for Collabora, we got to try out our new support for raw UDP transports and the latest ICE signalling. There was also good discussion about future directions for file transfer and relaying support in Jingle, as well as XTLS and its relationship to Jingle. Plus, the testing done on the day itself was continued afterwards, notably including working interoperability between our ICE library, libnice, with Paul's implementation.

Syndicated 2009-02-25 08:10:04 (Updated 2009-02-25 19:44:34) from Dafydd

2 Dec 2008 (updated 21 Jan 2009 at 21:07 UTC) »

Multi-User Jingle

Update Since I posted this, we discovered that our first choice of name, Mingle, has some trademark problems. For the time being, we're going to call it Multi-User Jingle.

When I joined Collabora in 2006, I was quickly thrown into the deep end when I was assigned to work on extending Jingle, the then-nascent VoIP protocol for Jabber, to support video. That work came to fruition on the Nokia N800, and the protocol we developed is incorporated into the latest Jingle drafts (which incidentally are now in Last Call).

This year, we wanted to try to take Jingle further by extending it to support more than two participants, and a grant from the NLnet Foundation made it possible for Sjoerd and I to spend time on it. I'm now happy to announce that we have a working implementation of the beast we've dubbed Mingle Multi-User Jingle. There is still much that remains to be done, but we think that the basic design is finished.

MUJ client screenshot

Our initial implementation builds heavily on work done by others. Wim's RTP session manager for GStreamer gives us clock syncing and RTCP support. Olivier's Farsight 2 work gives us multiparty-capable codec discovery and autoplugging. Youness's work on libnice gives us robust NAT traversal using ICE.

Future protocol work includes support for multicast transport, media mixers and relays, and of course ironing out all the corner cases that will inevitably turn up. Our ultimate goals are to standardise the protocol through the XEP process and to make it possible to use it with Empathy.

We've submitted a draft XEP to the XMPP editor, and kicked off some discussion on the Jingle mailing list. Our wiki page describes how to get our client working. This currently isn't as easy as we'd like due to the dependency on recent versions of various components, but should become easier with time.

Syndicated 2008-12-02 19:00:32 (Updated 2009-01-21 20:37:57) from Dafydd

24 Oct 2008 (updated 24 Oct 2008 at 18:05 UTC) »

serious change

My friend Francis has launched Serious Change, an initiative to represent UK citizens who want climate change to be taken as seriously as it deserves to be, and who believe it can be an opportunity and not just a threat. As a MySociety dude, Francis knows a thing or two about getting people engaged via useful websites.

Francis rightly points out that climate change is not a partisan issue. Nor is it a ‘green’ issue. It affects us all. It's not just another environmental problem. It changes everything. Individual, voluntary action will not solve it — even the Confederation of British Industry is calling for the government to legislate (and is in the meantime getting proactive). Furthermore, what we do (or don't do) about it now can seriously affect how things turn out.

Given the urgency and magnitude of the problem, why don't we seem to be taking serious action?

If you feel similarly, I urge you to join in.

Syndicated 2008-10-24 16:37:40 (Updated 2008-10-24 17:19:27) from Dafydd

Control-click

The fact that you can use Control-click to open URLs in Gnome Terminal is not very discoverable. (Just clicking doesn't do anything; perhaps this is to avoid breaking text selection?) I can't remember how I found out about it myself, but somebody I pointed it out to recently was delighted that they didn't have to use the context menu to open URLs, so I think it deserves wider publicity.

Syndicated 2008-03-25 16:59:29 (Updated 2008-03-25 17:01:04) from Dafydd

Internet cloud

This is my new favourite depiction of the Internet, courtesy of RFC 908:

An ASCII art diagram that uses a cloud of assorted non-letter characters to represent the Internet

Given that the Internet is a bit like a game of Robot Finds Kitten, it only makes sense that it look like one. Alternatively, it's reminiscent of the swearing in Asterix, which is also appropriate.

Syndicated 2008-01-06 23:44:29 from Dafydd

do not confuse

stationary stationery shop
mobile stationery shop
stationary mobile shop
mobile mobile shop

Syndicated 2007-12-24 02:15:16 (Updated 2007-12-24 02:34:09) from Dafydd

identity management

Crypto-Gram recently recommended a study by Utica College's Centre for Identity Management & Information Protection. They do not limit their interest in personal information to the abstract: indeed they require your name, job title, company and email address if you would like to read the study.

Syndicated 2007-11-25 21:54:16 from Dafydd

Loudmouth 1.3.2 released

I just released Loudmouth 1.3.2. This has been some time in the making: the goal has been to provide new features and keep compatibility with the stable 1.2 branch while Loudmouth 2.0 matures. We managed to add support for STARTTLS encryption, SASL authentication and DNS SRV lookups with minimal additions to the API. Together, these changes mean that Loudmouth will Just Work with your Jabber account in more cases, and that Loudmouth complies better with the XMPP 1.0 standard.

Users of Gossip and Telepathy will benefit from these improvements, and they should land in Maemo in the Diablo timeframe. We anticipate some stabilisation work on the 1.3 branch followed by a stable 1.4 release.

Senko deserves much of the credit for this release; he worked hard to make this happen. Thanks to Micke for supporting me in getting my first Loudmouth release out. Thanks also to Nokia, who supported Collabora's work.

Syndicated 2007-10-31 16:54:47 (Updated 2007-10-31 17:34:17) from Dafydd

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