Ticket #34 on Pidgin’s Trac Record

April 10th, 2008 • General

There are three popular messengers that support voice calls: MSN (or Live) Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and Google Talk. While MSN and Yahoo use proprietary protocols, Google relies on extending a popular messaging protocol called Jabber, which makes it all the more relevant.

Google implemented voice chat in Google Talk and packaged that implementation in a library called Jingle, which was then transformed into a proposed Jabber standard, XEP-0166. Note that Google’s libjingle is not an exact implementation of XEP-0166, it differs slightly in the way it initiates its sessions, but that’s just a minor inconvenience.

Jingle has been introduced back in 2005, and even three years later, while most messengers tried to incorporate it, most still don’t support it. That’s why I got excited when I read Ticket #34 on Pidgin’s Trac. The ticket includes a bunch of patches that link Pidgin with Farsight which already supports Google Talk and Jingle.

Now the ticket isn’t assigned to a milestone, so we won’t be seeing voice support in the next couple of Pidgin version, especially that this code is only a month old. But the ticket’s been there for a year, and somebody has decided to dedicate some time to it, and that’s always a good sign.

I’m glad that the Pidgin team decided not to re-invent the wheel, and use Farsight. Pidgin can now, without much effort, support proprietary protocols as soon as they are implemented in Farsight. Meanwhile, I can stick to Tapioca for when I absolutely need to hear a human voice.

Nanostick: A Portable Nanoweb Server

April 7th, 2008 • 2 comments General

Nanoweb is a Web server written entirely in PHP. Of course it’s not the kind of server you’d use with YouTube’s traffic, but it’s great for personal use, especially that it only needs a copy of PHP to run.

I needed a portable Dokuwiki that I carry around on my USB stick. Not only carry-in-key-chain portable, but also cross-platform platform portable. Mac OS and most Linuxes come with PHP installed, so I can run my pocket wiki without fiddling with configuration files. The Windows version on the other hand, needs to include PHP and some extensions, which amount to about 5MB extra.

The details are explained in the README file which you’ll find in Nanostick’s package. Nanostick by itself only weighs 250KB; adding PHP and compressing it leaves us with 2.5MB.

Version 0.0.1 includes a copy of PHP 5.2.5 for convenience only. Any subsequent version will not have PHP included.

Let me know if you face any trouble with it, or if there’s anything I can do to improve it.

inetd for Win32

April 3rd, 2008 • General

I found a hacked-up inetd.exe bundled with a “cheap” Perl HTTPD server. I couldn’t dig up its origins. This thing’s been written 12 years ago by one S. Freyder, and it kept crashing on XP and Vista

Here’s the source, and recompiled version linked against libcmt.lib instead of MSVCRT, so it will run on its own. Unfortunately it doubled in size, from 20KB to almost 57KB, I hope you don’t run into storage trouble.

The Kernel’s Business

April 2nd, 2008 • 1 comment General

The Kernel’s going to focus mainly on enterprise security and communication. You won’t be hearing news about it on this blog, but you can bookmark The Kernel’s site and get back to it in a couple of weeks.

Here’s what I’m so excited about: Even though security companies are growing like fungi in the Gulf, there isn’t much serious focus on enterprise security. The knowhow is largely imported, most of the available solutions are developed elsewhere, and it costs ridiculous amounts of money to simply close your front doors.

We’re not going into the saturated firewall, IPS/IDS market; these products cannot protect you by themselves without understanding how they work and their pros and cons. We want to make sure that data is never compromised, no matter how aggressive an attack is.

You might have heard of steganography, which is the science behind hiding information. There are many applications that can hide documents inside other documents on the computer (Steganos comes to mind), and they do a great job at it, but they are limited to digital steganography.

Here’s a simplification of how these applications work:

• Pick a binary file.
• Pick another binary file.
• Scramble second file’s bits and store among.
• Restore hidden file with password or key.

Here’s how we’re doing it:

• Pick a media file, an image for example.
• Pick a file to hide or a message to store.
• Hide file inside image.
• Print image on a $100 printer.
• Scan the image on the other receiver’s side.
• Restore hidden file with password or key.

So instead of manipulating the the bits of the media file itself, we’re manipulating the signals it sends and making them carry data inconceivable to the human senses, and sometimes even machine’s. The very same principle can work on other media files, the bigger and noisier, the better. Now we’ll be able to hide PDF files over traditional FM radio stations, or broadcast Picture-in-Picture TV channels quite literally.

1st of April, Q2 2008

April 1st, 2008 • 2 comments General

It’s been a whole quarter since the melancholic goodbye post.

I’m going to refrain from dropping some lousy April’s fool’s joke, I’ve never been a fan of “not” jokes; and unless yours is at least as good as finding water on mars, my advice is to refrain to.

The last three months, my Q1/2008, were dedicated to founding a start up. We’ve just got this little space in Dubai Airport Free Zone, a.k.a. DAFZA, and we’re going to deal mostly with IT security. We called it “The Kernel”, wish us luck.

Speaking of Dubai and IT, I’ve recently had a chance with a bunch of geeks at DemoCamp Dubai, an informal conference where four or five presenters show off their skills and projects for 15 minutes each. I believe the only other place where you’d find such a friendly crowd is at a rehab support group.

Now, to explain why Scatterism looks so plain: I’m still running WordPress 2.1, while 2.5 has been release just a few days ago. I’ve customized the database structure a little, especially that it needed to accommodate Ultimate Tag Warrior. I’m using Jotdown, which is a combination of Markdown, GeSHi, some footnote parsing code, and a bunch of preprocessing macros, all of which need some work to make sure they don’t break WordPress 2.5. In addition to all of this, my eyes are sore from looking at my current lights off/lights on theme, so I’ll stick to Simplr (thank you Scott) for a while until I redesign.

I wish I could speed things up a little bit, but Dubai is a time-eating monster, with long roads and traffic jams, and unlike every other full-time blogger, I’m neither full-time, nor am I working from home.

Thanks Q1 for helping me out. Thanks Q2, the funniest intro award goes to you. Thank you those who still have Scatterism on their feed readers.