This XML was recently caught exposing a bug in xmpp.py:

<presence type="unavailable" from="user@gmail.com/resource" to="yahoo.transport"
xmlns:ses="yahoogoogle:session" ses:terminated="true"/>

also seen here and here.

The question remains: Are Google and Yahoo up to something?

OpenID is a decentralized digital identity system, in which any user’s online identity is given by URL (such as for a blog or a home page) [...], and can be verified by any server running the protocol. (wikipedia)

Okay so that’s cool – the idea is that you want to sign in on a web-site that you’ve never seen before, so you give it your OpenID and *poof* you’re in. As part of the package, the web-site can also request some profile information from your OpenID provider, so you don’t have to re-type it. Lots of work has happened behind the scenes to make sure who you say you are is valid, so that the web-site can trust your OpenID.

Unfortunatly you still have to log into your OpenID provider with a username and password. “I thought OpenID was supposed to help with this horrid multiple username and password problem”, I hear you cry – at least you (hopefully) trust your OpenID provider more than you do some abritary web-site.

Unlike most single sign-on architectures, OpenID does not specify the authentication mechanism. (wikipedia)

Cool! So we can pick our own. How about a password-less authentication, that uses your instant messenger identity to confirm your OpenID?

It’s actually easy, you just take a copy of the PHP Standalone OpenID Server, add the required PHP OpenID library, and add a sprinkle of XMPP XEP-0070 support in form of a patch. Bake for a short while, and be sure to serve hot

I’ve previously commented that I was working on Mozilla rendering support for my Chromeless Meebo Browser, well now it’s here.

To enable it you will need my upgraded version of the Mozilla ActiveX Control (As usual all the required files are in the distribution folder). Source diff is attached to bugzilla bug 340277.

You will need to hand edit the configuration file to change the Engine setting from Microsoft to Mozilla. If you’re using ClickOnce to launch the Meebo Browser, then you can find the configuration file under ‘C:\Documents and Settings\YourName\Local Settings\Apps\2.0\RandomId\RandomId\Somewhere’, just look for the lastest configuration file you can find and edit that one. I am planning to add a sort of configuration window to be able to change these settings from the frontend, once I’m happy that everything is working well.

Known Issues:

• There seems to be a problem with getting the cursor to appear in the text boxes so that you can log into you IM account. The work around is to swap to another application (even Notepad), and then back to MeeboBrowser – sometimes I’ve had to do this two or three times to get the cursor to appear.
• The tab key gets swallowed often, making it almost impossible to use.
• Tooltips don’t show.
• Clicked links don’t launch in a new browser window. (You can right click and select ‘Open’, but then you’re logged out of Meebo )

These are all caused by bugs and missing code in the Mozilla ActiveX Control. If you’d like to help out, please don’t hesitate.

I’ve been naughty, and haven’t posted any update for almost two months now. I thought that I should give at least a little feedback on what I’m up to:

GB-PVR: WebAdmin, Software Recorder, and less so External Recorder, work continues. The web admin is now fully themed using css, and is rapidly growing into a full featured web frontend and not just a recording management web page or two. Two other side projects have spawned aiming to support Web Services, and Proper Web Streaming.

The Software Recorder pluigin is slowly sporting support for more and more capture cards. The other day someone commented on the mamoth forum thread we have managed to build (almost 900 posts). I find it quite satisfying that the top two threads (by number of posts and number of views) are for the WebAdmin and the Software Recorder – also other programmers are getting involved and are sending in patches and fixes

XMPP/Jabber: If you haven’t tried gtalk in gmail yet, where have you been living? At work I’ve been looking to put in a IM server – Jabber based of course. I use jabberd 2 for darkskies.za.net, but it’s not quite ready to be used at the enterprise level on a windows box.

Wildfire to the rescue. It has full LDAP integration, shared roster groups, a pretty web admin interface, a bunch of plugins, including an auto-updater for their Spark client. Only down side is that it’s java, but on the server that can be excused, on the client, not so much. Using a client like Pandion makes that client side experience far richer, but then you loose your auto-updating capabilites *sigh*. Pandion does feature Single-Sign-On support though.

So my attention for the past weeks has been turned to adding SSO into a variety of XMPP servers, starting with xmppd.py for the rapid prototype approach, and proving that it can be done. Then visiting Java’s SASL API, and trying to figure out how to hook it all up. I’ve ended up with a bridge between Java’s SASL API’s and Windows’ SSPI API’s. So anything that SSPI supports, SASL can now use too. A few minor tweaks to wildfire, and it too should be able to authenticate using GSSAPI (Kerberos), or NTLM (for Pandion).

Of course mustang is supposed to have native support for Kerberos and SPNEGO, but you can’t get into the RFE’s to see the details. (I checked build 71, and it didn’t seem to have any new toys – I see the beta is out, and I’m busy downloading that to see if it does)

Work: Terribly busy with a new semi-’proof of concept’ security framework to be used across applications for multiple clients, etc. The power outages haven’t helped – getting (back) to work at 4am to do a deployment for the previous project wasn’t exactly lots-of-fun. We’ve (royal) decided to go with VB LINQ for the new framework, and it seems to be everything it was promised to be. Gone are the days where you have to build stored procdures for each and every database access (by hand or using tools like Codesmith), LINQ does all of that for you – at run-time.

Home: Bathroom renovations are progressing, I can’t wait for it to be all over, and we can stop walking around in cement laden carpets :p

Now just before I disappear off to sleep, let me point out that 150 million Firefox downloads are approaching fast – that’s about 50 millions downloads in 5 months – wow.

I’m busy developing the irc-transport for xmpp.py and the debuging output is coloured via ANSI escape sequences. This works great on a linux terminal, or via PuTTY, but not so great in a win32 console. I searched quite hard on Google for a ‘modern’ ansi.sys or ansi.com replacement, but couldn’t find anything.

So here’s my attempt at making something work in win32.

The executable will spawn a copy of the default command shell (from COMPSEC), unless you give it something to run on the command line. Basically it pump’s stdout and stderr, and parses the ANSI escape codes into win32 console API calls. For quick development I wrote it up in c#, but it looks like some of the .net console async pipe handling code blocks badly, so I may end up porting it to plain c.

I’ve just been doing some coding for the irc-transport for the xmpppy project (now with vcard/whois and channel listing support!) when I came across Lobby4Linux in a channel topic. I think this guy’s blog is great!

In other news Gareth has been working on the G8 REBOOT site. I suggest you swing by and help Make Poverty History.

I’ve just noticed that Gareth picked up on the Rands In Repose: N.A.D.D. article, and that Mark Shuttleworth is behind Canonical/Ubuntu. I also noticed that Rands links to Joel Spolsky.

Man what a small world!

Much along the lines of Hal’s Jabber ideas, I’ve been thinking that someone should code up TortoiseDarcs. I mean TortoiseCVS and TortoiseSvn are well used in the win32 world to provide a friendly interface to the user, so it’s about time we had one for darcs too.

So when you’ve done it, let me know

If you’re interested in trying out Nolan’s work on the MUC interface in Psi then grab one of my builds.

Quick summary of events for HalR9000:

• I’m using the VS.Net 2003 build environment. I happen to have ActivePerl installed too.
• Grab CVS version of Psi – requires CVS client like TortoiseCVS
• Get Qt, and QCA libraries as described on the Psi development page
• Applied patch for QCA to get it to work under VS.Net 2003
• Build using makewin.bat
• Profit!!!

If you want to build the MUC version then:

• Get a native Win32 build of Arch – don’t forget to upgrade to 1.3 (I never tested 1.2, but I know 1.3 works)
• Follow example instructions and check out copy of Nolan’s Arch Archive

I had to hand edit some imports to get it to compile (just changed ‘using XMPP::XMPP;’ to ‘using namespace XMPP;’ in two header files). I was chatting to Nolan at the time, so I’m sure these fixes will go into his development archive too.

Update: I changed the link at the top to point to the list of builds. My first manual build is still available. (This archive only has the bare minimum of files, you must copy all other files from another Psi installation. If you Qt library is not version 3.3.4 then you must rename it to qt-mt334.dll. Nolan also informs me that it’s missing the required iconset files.)

Things I’m busy with in the Jabber world:

• irc transport
• msn transport
• Psi

So again more mailing lists.

I’m watching the msn transport for file transfer and status messages. The irc transport I’ve been watching for ages now, and I help Mike with patches for the transport.

I’ve been using Psi for a long while now, and I’m starting to get bored with the slow release cycle. So I’ve been trying out alternate builds. I’m also planning on doing daily CVS builds, and MUC builds too.

okay, so I’ve been very quiet over the past few weeks after struggling with ipsec. I’ve actually been doing a hang of a lot of things, which I will proceed to post individually.