technology: March 2005 archives


Jabber and Everything After

[ rakaur on Thu Mar 24 at 10:09 AM // category: software, technology ]

So, I’ve finally moved my attention from IRC to XMPP, commonly known as Jabber.

XMPP has a lot of good things going for it. It’s formalized, open, and maintained. It has a very good organization working to keep it free, open, flexible, and extensible. The Jabber Software Foundation reviews extension proposals, and when they publish a Final Draft most servers and clients implement them.

XMPP is ICQ-style IM at its core. That is, you send a message somewhat a la email (which is how Jabber servers work actually). Extensions provide chat-style IMs (AIM, MSN, etc), IRC-like channels (via Multi-User Chat rooms), among an unlimited number of other potential services.

To be honest, the only reason I’ve ignored it for so long is that it’s based upon XML, which I hate. But, when I stop to think about it, it’s probably a good thing. That is, if you don’t care about bandwidth. With a protocol of this complexity, in order to do a syntax-based ASCII or binary protocol the parsers would likely be insanely complex.

Jabber is neat. There’s a server running at ericw.org and my JID is rakaur@ericw.org. The #malkier channel on our IRC network is relayed to/from malkier@conference.ericw.org. All you random internet stalkers can’t drop by and have a swell time!

-- rakaur // 2005.03.24 @ 10:09 AM

Oh Portage, You Blow

[ rakaur on Wed Mar 02 at 07:03 AM // category: software, technology, unix ]

It sure would be nice if the Gentoo Portage maintainers only managed to fuck something up every other time they update some random ebuild whose failure to compile fucks over my entire system.

I swear to god I’m so sick of going to update (emerge -Dau world) and having it fail on the first or second build with some nonsensical error that results from the inept assholes over at Gentoo. The latest version of GTK has had a compile error ever since they put it in Portage, but do they fix it, fuck no. A whole shitload of things need GTK to build, and with the -D (—deep) flag on it’ll update the library before it updates the programs that use it.

Just a few minutes ago I was upgrading to the latest Portage revision (that’s bullshit too, but I’ll get to that in a second) of beep-media-player. It gets finished, I load bmp, and it gives me an error about not being able to play the song. Apparently, for some widely unknown reason, they decided to remove mp3 support by default (prententious ogg-using cocksuckers) so now I have to rebuild it AGAIN with USE="mp3". Oh, but wait, there’s a compile error in that! It tries to link to a hard coded version of the standard C++ library in /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.3.4/. But wait, I have gcc 3.3.5, so there’s no 3.3.4 folder, but that’s where it looks anyway, because it’s apparently HARD FUCKING CODED. The only simple way to fix this was for me to symlink 3.3.4 to 3.3.5, which worked.

And that brings me to the Portage revision numbers (the -rN at the end of version numbers). They up this number when they make a revision to the ebuild itself, while nothing actually happens to the program that would in any way concern me with updating it. It’s always nice when there’s a new Portage revision of, say, OpenOffice, and Portage decides to spend a full 24 hours upgrading it when there’s no fucking point.

It’s pretty damn bad when the maintainers of the OS can’t get something right and I have to put cheap hacks all over the place to get my system to run properly.

This is going to be a rant soon.

-- rakaur // 2005.03.02 @ 07:03 AM

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