Well, another couple of people using Jabber now, but I’ve a feeling it’ll take a long while to convince everyone else to give it a go. So I’ll just have to keep on harping on about it until they relent…

In our flat, well, my current flat and my previous flat next door, we’re running our own Jabber server for in-house communications. That means that we can still message each other when the Internet connection goes down – and me being in a different house (we’ve got an ethernet cable swinging between windows) means that it’s not quite as lazy as it seems. So that’s quite useful.

Also, a new version of Psi has come out, and amongst other things, now supports file transfer. A couple of other Jabber clients have done file-transfer for a few years now, but generally by coming up with their own way of doing it. Now that all the file-transfer protocols have been officially standardised, Psi has added it to its repertoire. I’m not holding my breath for anyone to implement file-transfer on the cross-network transports though!

I bought some climbing boots and a chalkbag yesterday, seeing as the whole climbing thing is becoming quite a routine, and I really, really need them for bouldering in Sherfield. But the thing that grabbed my attention was when I came to pay for it all – I got to use my chip-and-PIN on my credit card for the first time! Finally, I feel like we’re heading in the right direction, after spending years and years transferring billions of pounds around the country using the most ludicrously pathetic security system I’ve ever come across. Still, maybe some technologists should realise that despite signatures being sooo technically poor, for the most part, they still work. Most security systems don’t actually need to be perfect to be functional.

Still, in Britain we’re over a decade behind France when it comes to using PINs at points of sale, and when I was travelling around Australia and New Zealand I was grateful that many British tourists ahead of me had got all the checkout assistants well trained – as soon as they recognised a card from a British bank, they used the fall-back signature verification. Interestingly, PINs work fine in cashpoints, but even though I knew them for my cards, their point-of-sale network obviously wasn’t connected up to our PIN verification network (or however it all really works), since I had to sign for everything. Maybe next time it’ll all be joined up better.

Hmm. I’ve aquired a few draft postings (ahh, the joys of a proper blogging tool), and I should get round to posting them. For the moment though, I’ll talk about something else.

I use Jabber for instant messaging, not MSN or ICQ or Yahoo or anything else. Well, that’s not entirely accurate, since I’ve been having a problem with it for the last few weeks. Not long after I got back, the MSN transport that I was using seems to have packed up, and it hasn’t reappeared. Transports to proprietary networks (proprietary = bad, mkay?) aren’t exactly the most reliable of things anyway, as I’ve discussed previously, so it’s not all that surprising. And I’ve heard Microsoft have been messing around over the last few months trying to stop this kind of thing anyway. So recently, I’ve only been messaging other people on Jabber.

So really, I haven’t been using it for IM at all, since I don’t know anyone else who uses Jabber often. So why have I stuck to it? Stubbornness, mainly, with a bit of ideology thrown in. But there is one over-riding reason – it’s called JabRSS and it’s the perfect fusion of two high-geek-factor technologies. I’ve added 37 RSS (huh?) feeds to it, mainly blogs that I read. It then sends me a jabber message when they get updated – it sent 411 headlines in the last 7 days. So that saves me soooo much time trawling around the web checking for updated sites – the updates come to me, and I can see if I want to read the rest of the article in question. Nice. If you keep track of lots of sites, and especially if you swap between lots of computers (and therefore a dedicated RSS reader is a bit of a hassle), then I’d recommend it.

Anyway, today I managed to persuade someone (with no important sounding position ) to sign up to Jabber, so if you decide to do so, you’ll probably already know both of us. And for the foreseeable future, it’s about the only way you’re going to be able to message me. andrewjrallan@jabber.org is the jabberid to add to your contact list.

(And for those of you who are on my contact list but don’t use Jabber any more, I’m interested to know why you’ve stopped.)

So, Sam has moved onto Wordpress, and changed away from Fireburst to samsharpe.net. And got rid of all his former entries, again. That’s something that would have narked me 11 months ago, since I was very much into the whole ‘URLs are permanent, and all data on the intarweb should be so too’ philosophy, but with that, and many other things, I’m proud to say I don’t really care anymore.

In an attempt to directly contradict myself, I’ve ensured that if you try following an old link to a weblog post, you get redirected to the new archives. Cause there’s just sooo many people linking to my old weblog posts. I’ll give it a couple of days, and retire the old database.

Mike has also started using Wordpress, so that makes three of us in as many weeks. I wonder if anyone else is going to give it a whirl…

Anyone had any experience with Gallery? I tried installing it today, wasted an hour or two with it, then ending up deleting it. I installed it a couple of years ago on another website I was running, and it still doesn’t seem right. The only thing going for it is the ‘resize image before uploading’ option on the java plugin (since I’m certainly not uploading full-size 6.4 Megapixel images over Gary’s modem), but it just lacks the quality of something like Wordpress. I also had to resort to writing a PHP script to uninstall it, since the images I uploaded were owned by the webserver and so stayed there after I had deleted the rest of it (shell_exec() is your friend).

So is anyone out there in my corner of the world using it? Any alternatives? Is it hard to customise? Maybe I’ll try again when version 2 comes out. Still haven’t got my photos online though. Hmmm.

Last night, for a change, I helped DramSoc run one of their events. Well, I just stood around for most of the time, but that’s cause I’m not a sound engineer. I did help Ant when he was pissing around in the Tanaka building – when we went back at half eleven, the front doors were locked, but the entrance from the walkway was open. Or rather, it was opening and almost shutting, then opening again, as was the inner of the two doors; it reminded me of Half-life in some way, since if you timed it right you could walk through both doors. Bear in mind that the Queen is coming to see this place in a few weeks time – I wonder if anyone will relate the security guards’ opinion of the new building to Her Majesty.

After negoitiating with the security guy who found us (’How did you get in?’ says he, ‘Through the door,’ I almost say), we got back just in time to see the terrible final act of the Gig night. I’ve no idea who they were (but you can see their advertising plastered all over the union in the form of smallish stickers), but they were neither any good nor funny. Their act was to sing along to a CD of quite crap songs, jump around, and try and get a bit of comedy in amongst it. Let’s put it this way, the main prop for their set was a condom one of them pulled out in the middle of a song about jerking off. What dire crap. And the crowd were telling them so.

It was almost entertaining at the end, when there were slight ‘communication issues’ between the duo and their CD jockey about whether the guy was playing the right track. Lots of swearing, derision and cries of unproffesionalism (no mention of cowboys though), and that was just between the duo and their CD dude. Anyway, it was all going down the shitter, so one of them took it apon himself to make a flying dive into the crowd, stood up, and headbutted one of the students. What a way to finish.

The only issue that brought up was that I’m not sure the stewards knew how to react – or things have changed a lot over the years. Normally it doesn’t take anything like a flying headbutt to get yourself man-handled out of the building, but nobody seemed to want to manhandle one of the performers out the door. If those two idiots had been performing somewhere else, I don’t think they’d have made it out alive. Still, it livened it up a bit.