PEAR Unit test results via Twitter

I just set up a few cron jobs to publish PEAR Unit test results, on the web, and via Twitter / Identi.ca / Atom feed, each and every night.

Go take a look!

Interacting with Google Calendar via Jabber/XMPP (Google Talk)

So, you've got a machine with PHP on it floating around, and your quickly-add-to-google-calendar extension isn't working for firefox 3.

You could go the ubiquity route, but... what if you wanted something with a bit more personality?

With that in mind, I'd like to share with you all xmppcalendarbot.

He's written in PHP and sits in your buddy list.

There's a bit of setup involved, but it is well worth it.

Get the code

Do:
cd ~/
svn checkout http://xmppcalendarbot.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ xmppcalendarbot
pear channel-discover pear.phpmafia.net
pear install phpmafia/Zend

Other bits to remember: you probably want to make sure the mb_string extension is enabled!

Setup the accounts

If you want, you can set it up to use your own gmail accounts (make sure you have access to google calendar!), or you can create a new set of google accounts just for your bot.

I opted for the second option, so I didn't end up trashing my personal data.

If you go for the two accounts option, make sure that you add your primary gmail account with the ability to manage events and sharing.

Get the details and stick them into a config.php file:

<?php
$user = 'you@gmail.com';
$pass = 'fishbarmonkey';

Make rocket go now!

php ~/xmppcalendarbot/main.php

... and add the bot as your friend. It doesn't hurt to log into the account using pidgin to get over this initial hurdle if you need to.

Talking to your new friend

Quit

(23:24:53) daniel.oconnor@gmail.com/Home: quit
(23:24:54) your.calbot@gmail.com: Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?...
(23:24:57) your.calbot@gmail.com: Dave...
(23:25:00) your.calbot@gmail.com: I really think I'm entitled to an answer to that question...
(23:25:03) your.calbot@gmail.com: I know everything hasn't been quite right with me, but I can assure you now, very confidently, that it's going to be alright again...

Quit now

(23:30:59) daniel.oconnor@gmail.com/Home: quit now
(23:31:00) your.calbot@gmail.com: Nap time! Zzzzz

Help

(23:27:08) daniel.oconnor@gmail.com/Home: help
(23:27:08) your.calbot@gmail.com: Commands available: quit, restart, help, news, break, agenda, reminder, when

Reminder

(23:27:58) daniel.oconnor@gmail.com/Home: reminder cook a delicious meal, tomorrow at 7pm
(23:28:04) your.calbot@gmail.com: Mmm hmm, got it.
(23:28:04) your.calbot@gmail.com: Ok: I've booked it in, you'll get a reminder 30 minutes before
(23:28:24) daniel.oconnor@gmail.com/Home: reminder shop for your meal, tomorrow morning 8am
(23:28:26) your.calbot@gmail.com: Mmm hmm, got it.
(23:28:27) your.calbot@gmail.com: Ok: I've booked it in, you'll get a reminder 30 minutes before

When is...

(23:28:44) your.calbot@gmail.com: Found you have 2 event(s) for meal
(23:28:44) your.calbot@gmail.com: 1. cook a delicious meal (2008-10-08 08:30:00am to 2008-10-08 09:30:00am)
(23:28:44) your.calbot@gmail.com: 2. shop for your meal, morning (2008-10-07 09:30:00pm to 2008-10-07 10:30:00pm)

News

(23:30:19) daniel.oconnor@gmail.com/Home: news http://clockwerx.blogspot.com/atom.xml 3
(23:30:21) your.calbot@gmail.com: Hello! We've got new Atom entries (25), showing up to 3
(23:30:22) your.calbot@gmail.com: Blair Athol to Crafers by CloCkWeRX
(23:30:22) your.calbot@gmail.com: A pox on your XAMPP and or houses (both of them?) by CloCkWeRX
(23:30:22) your.calbot@gmail.com: Asterisk and Sneaky Plans by CloCkWeRX

Agenda

(23:32:08) daniel.oconnor@gmail.com/Home: agenda tomorrow
(23:32:10) your.calbot@gmail.com: For 2008-10-08 you have 1 event(s)
(23:32:11) your.calbot@gmail.com: 1. cook a delicious meal (2008-10-08 06:00:00pm to 2008-10-08 07:00:00pm)
(23:32:24) daniel.oconnor@gmail.com/Home: agenda today
(23:32:26) your.calbot@gmail.com: For 2008-10-07 you have 1 event(s)
(23:32:27) your.calbot@gmail.com: 1. shop for your meal, morning (2008-10-08 07:00:00am to 2008-10-08 08:00:00am)

What's next?

Obviously I need to iron out some timezone conversion issues and generally provide some polish; but now I have a calendar agent I can ask to book me a holiday.

Specific improvements are going to include things like adding guests to events and working out command syntax.

I'm also going to think about the news reader side of it a bit more.

I can imagine you have an entire entourage of these, and you share them with your friends - one is the group calendar bot, another tells you about a certain RSS feed every hour (svn commits?), another is your identi.ca bot...

XMPPHP - Jabber for PHP

Just out, XMPPHP.

Neat.

I'd like to see what I can do today with creating a semi-complicated agent calendaring agent - something which knows when I'm free/busy and can add a simple task / appointment for me.

xOperator, the Valuation Industry, XSLT, GRDDL and RDF

I just discovered the most amazing thing. It's a jabber/xmpp sparql interface, called xOperator.

It sits between you, the end user, and multiple other agents and datastores. It uses XMPP (Google talk!) to interact with you.

You say things like:

me: add ds DBPedia http://dbpedia.org/sparql

me: query SELECT ?name WHERE {
   ?musician skos:subject <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Australian_musicians> .
   ?musician foaf:name ?name .
}

bot: (Alright, this is dummied up, but I *did* have it working with other stuff before)
"Ben Lee"@de
"Billy Thorpe"@de
"Brody Dalle"@de
"Charlie McMahon"@de
"Craig Nicholls"@de
"Daevid Allen"@de
"Delta Goodrem"@de
"Fritz Hart"@de
"James George Thirlwell"@de
"Joe Dolce"@de
"Johnny Diesel"@de
"Kasey Chambers"@de
"Kevin Johnson"@de
"Natalie Gauci"@de
"Percy Aldridge Grainger"@de
"Peter Garrett"@de
"Peter Allen"@de
"Rick Springfield"@de
"Richard Franklin"@de
"Sophie Monk"@de
"Steven Kilbey"@de
"Stevie Wright"@de
"Tina Arena"@de
"Toni Collette"@de

me: add template "Tell me about *" "PREFIX owl: <http: org="" 2002="" 07="">
PREFIX xsd: <http: org="" 2001="">
PREFIX rdfs: <http: org="" 2000="" 01="">
PREFIX rdf: <http: org="" 1999="" 02="">
PREFIX foaf: <http: com="" foaf="" 1="">
PREFIX dc: <http: org="" dc="" elements="" 1="">
PREFIX : <http: org="" resource="">
PREFIX dbpedia2: <http: org="" property="">
PREFIX dbpedia: <http: org="">
PREFIX skos: <http: org="" 2004="" 02="" skos="">


SELECT ?name WHERE {
   ?thing skos:subject <http: org="" resource=""> .
   ?thing foaf:name ?name .
}"

bot: template added

me: Tell me about German_musicians

me: Tell me about German_artists
bot: Store dbpedia answered:
     name
"A. R. Penck"@de
"Adolf Ziegler"@de
"Adolph Menzel"@de
"Albrecht Altdorfer"@de
"Alfred Harth"@de
"Alfred Rethel"@de
"Alfred Mahlau"@de
"André Butzer""@de
"Bruno Paul"@de
"Bärbel Bohley""@de
"Carl Grossberg"@de
"Carsten Höller""@de
"Charles Crodel"@de
"Christian Möller""@de
"Christoph Meckel"@de
"Christoph Ruckhäberle""@de
"Cosmas Damian Asam"@de
"Dieter Grossmann"@de
"Dieter Roth"@de
"Eberhard Bosslet"@de
"Eberhard Havekost"@de
"Egid Quirin Asam"@de
"Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven"@de
"Ernst Deger"@de
"Hugo Höppener""@de
"Franz Joseph Spiegler"@de
"Franz Wilhelm Seiwert"@de
"Franz Xaver Feuchtmayer der Jüngere""@de
"Franz Xaver Feuchtmayer"@de
"Frieder Nake"@de
"Fritz Maurischat"@de
"Gerd Aretz"@de
"Gerd Arntz"@de
"Gert Heinrich Wollheim"@de
"Gert Neuhaus"@de
"Hans Haacke"@de
"Hannah Höch""@de
"Hans Grundig"@de
"Hans Richter"@de
"Heiko Daxl"@de
"Heinrich Aldegrever"@de
"Herma Auguste Wittstock"@de
"Herbert Holzing"@de
"Horst Janssen"@de
"Horst Antes"@de
"Ignaz Günther""@de
"Jankel Adler"@de
"Hans Arp"@de
"Jim Avignon"@de
"Johann Peter Melchior"@de
"Johann Baptist Straub"@de
"Johann Joachim Kändler""@de
"Johann Joseph Christian"@de
"Johann Melchior Dinglinger"@de
"Johann Baptist Zimmermann"@de
"Johann Michael d.J. Feuchtmayer"@de
"Johannes Baader"@de
"Jonas Burgert"@de
"Joseph Anton Feuchtmayer"@de
"Gotthard Johnny Friedlaender"@de
"Jonathan Meese"@de
"Joseph Beuys"@de
"Karin Ulrike Soika"@de
"Karl von Fischer"@de
"Karl Hubbuch"@de
"Klaus Herlitz"@de
"Konrad Peter Cornelius Klapheck"@de
"Kurt Wegner"@de
"Leo Kahn"@de
"Franz Karl Leopold von Klenze"@de
"Lore Lorentz"@de
"Ludwig Fahrenkrog"@de
"Martin Kippenberger"@de
"Manfred Mohr"@de
"Manfred W. Jürgens""@de
"Maria Innocentia Hummel"@de
"Mariele Neudecker"@de
"Werner Mathias Goeritz Brunner"@de
"Mary Bauermeister"@de
"Max Ernst"@de
"Michael Buthe"@de
"Matthäus Günther""@de
"Michael Sowa"@de
"Otto Eckmann"@de
"Otto Hupp"@de
"Ottmar Hörl""@de
"Otto Pankok"@de
"Otto Piene"@de
"Peter Vischer"@de
"Peter Dreher"@de
"Rebecca Horn"@de
"Ruben Talberg"@de
"Rosemarie Trockel"@de
"Sandra Rauch"@de
"Silvia Quandt"@de
"Thomas Eller"@de
"Thomas Schütte""@de
"Tilman Riemenschneider"@de
"Tomma Abts"@de
"Torsten Amft"@de
"Uwe Laysiepen"@de
"Veit Stoß""@de
"Virgil Solis"@de
"Wilfried Behre"@de
"Wilhelm Heine"@de
"Wilm Weppelmann"@de
"Wolfgang Joop"@de
"Wolfgang Müller""@de
"Wolfgang Tillmans"@de
"Evi Moechel"@de

(10:22:30 PM) clockwerx@livejournal.com/Home: Tell me about Australian_musicians
(10:22:32 PM) daniel.oconnor: Store dbpedia answered:
     name
"Ben Lee"@de
"Billy Thorpe"@de
"Brody Dalle"@de
"Charlie McMahon"@de
"Craig Nicholls"@de
"Daevid Allen"@de
"Delta Goodrem"@de
"Fritz Hart"@de
"James George Thirlwell"@de
"Joe Dolce"@de
"Johnny Diesel"@de
"Kasey Chambers"@de
"Kevin Johnson"@de
"Natalie Gauci"@de
"Percy Aldridge Grainger"@de
"Peter Garrett"@de
"Peter Allen"@de
"Rick Springfield"@de
"Richard Franklin"@de
"Sophie Monk"@de
"Steven Kilbey"@de
"Stevie Wright"@de
"Tina Arena"@de
"Toni Collette"@de

Big whoop you say.

Well, I've been working on both an XML_GRDDL package (php5), and the relevant GRDDL transformations to turn LIXI Valuation documents into the relevant RDF/XML representation.

I'm also re-deploying work's internal Jabber server in the not too distant future.

So:
1. We handle a pretty big chunk of all residential valuations within Australia.
2. A lot of that gets described adequately in LIXI
3. There's now or soon to be a GRDDL transformation or two for that
4. And a GRDDL parser for PHP
5. Add in xOperator
6. Add in robust jabber services
7. Mix in a few microformats as well

Viola:
My workplace is half a step away from becoming a knowledge enterprise as well as a valuation panel manager.

That's not bad for a few days off!

Imagine these future scenarios:

Working smarter with internal data and external clients:

Internal xOperator to answer questions like "show me similar valuations we've done to address xyz", and "show me everything valuer X has completed over $1million"

Paid commercial access to a SPARQL service as well, for larger clients who want to better understand the marketplace
Paid commercial access to an xOperator style service for smaller clients, who just want a couple of pre-built, on demand answers


Publishing old (> 12-24 months) LIXI data on the web
Merge our data up with other countries, like the US, for trend analysis
Provide anonymized public data, with http basic auth. to protect names, addresses, privacy
Merge diverse sets of data - ie, imagine EuroStat data for Australia, but with an atomic level of detail available about the raw input

Provide semi-automated valuations based on known data
Suburb X has a population of Y and an area of Z (db/wikipedia), factor that into calculations

How the hell does Jabber s2s / federation work?

I have my gmail account, I have my livejournal account, I even have a jabber.org account. I know livejournal is federated with google talk. Only gaim doesn't easily explain in the UI how the hell I sign in to my google talk account but talk to my contacts at livejournal.

What am I missing and why does this suck?

Update: What I really want is buddy adding UI hints.

Last.fm vs Google Music Trends

Google Talk just got a 'show my music' feature; like MSN has and like mIRC scripts have been doing since the dawn of time.

I wonder

• Is it easy to do what google talk has done as; say; a gaim plugin?
• Does the jabber protocol have features for this?
• How hard would it be to do a last.fm / audioscrobbler plugin that submits to google music trends?
• How hard would it be to make the google talk client know what songbird is playing?
• How hard would it be to make songbird export XSPF?
  

Jabber Chumpbot

Our work has a jabber server.

I want a Chumpbot for jabber.

Take it away, lazyweb.

OpenZoep

OpenZoep looks exciting simply because of the XMPP (Jabber) integration.

The AttentionTrust Bandwagon

Reactions to the concept of AttentionTrust appear mixed: ranging from bullshit to confusion.

I like the idea. I've seen it before. The difference between what I saw before and what's out there is all in the message.

Menow:
* Describe what you are doing
* Share it with other applications
* End user benefits from software being more aware of what is being focused on.

AttentionTrust / Root.net:
* Record all your interaction with the webbrowser.
* Hock it to a vendor.
* ????
* Profit!

I don't like it in the slightest: the pitch is all wrong, wrong, wrong!

If I were pitching AttentionTrust, I'd do it like this.

The world is a chaotic place, and the world wide web is even more so. We're assaulted with more and more information, we're pestered by irrelevant advertising, and at the end of the day we still have to be productive. RSS, blogging, podcasting, email: all of these things scream out for my attention, each clamouring for more-more-more of my time.

If my instant messaging client flashes one more time when I'm busy, I'll kill someone. If someone asks me "what r u up to" one more time in a poor attempt at human communication, I'll break down into tears.

Instead, I've now got AttentionTrust. It's a plugin for firefox that will help me minimize the day to day issues I face and provide me only with relevant information. I can opt-in to allow the data of whatever it is I am up to as this very second to be collected; and if I so choose, I can give this to a bunch of webservices that will help me work better.

For instance: imagine looking for a book on amazon; and having a service notify me that there's infact a range of cheaper copies of the same book on barnes & noble - productive and helpful.

Imagine my instant messaging client being able to directly share whatever it is I am looking at with a buddy - "help me find out about Africa"; and I make my browsing history available via gaim / jabber - two heads are better than one.

Imagine being able to have a calendar / task planning application that takes into account just how much time I spend googling things.

Imagine having a nagging application that tells me I'm blogging too much and I should get back to work... (Robby, who sits behind me usually fills this function).

I'd like all of those uses. Just don't mention money or spyware!

It's akin to being a pizza oven manufacturer who's comparing their product to a holocaust era, nazi made concentration camp oven: it does not make the reader feel easy about buying your idea if it makes them feel queasy.

Laptop Hunting in Adelaide & Trust

Being the saavy consumer that I am, I thought that there was no better way to purchase a laptop than to perhaps shop around on ebay.

I saw a laptop that was more or less what I wanted, and I discovered to my delight the seller was based in Adelaide.

Quick as a flash I sent off a message asking where they were located; if I could come in and browse some of the laptops they had on hand. I would prefer to hand over a large wad of cash in person and carry off a laptop there and then as opposed to trusting them to deliver it to me.

The response:

Although we do have a affiliated store in Adelaide we don not allow preinspection of the ebay notebooks and the store has completely different stock, pickup is available once purchased

Best Regards
Stuart

All I wanted was a laptop of some description, I wasn't overly picky - I don't care if it's the ebay one or something similar - and you're telling me that you would rather not have my business; that you'd rather I didn't come into your store and you'd rather not talk to me about purchasing a laptop from you?

What a fantastic business model.

I can't for the life of me even find the "associated Adelaide shopfront". Why is it that people are afraid to link their online ebay identies to their actual business?

It's evident that the feedback rating system of ebay is shockingly poor: 99.3% positive ratings - but I get the distinct and uneasy impression that if I were to deal with this merchant in person I'd be left with a very sour taste in my mouth and wouldn't part with my money.

People aren't interested in quality metadata: ratings like "excellent item AAAAAAAAAA" show that people are just getting into a positive feedback circlejerk: these consumers aren't smart (or at least don't care about written language, which gives me a poor impression of their intellect), and I don't know them, so why should I trust them?

And communications with the seller in question show that poor bastard doesn't know how to deal with people: we're just a meal ticket and a positive feedback rating; he doesn't want to deal with us in person.

If I were building an ecommerce trust rating system; here's how I'd do it.
* An application is downloaded that hooks into your email accounts, instant messaging accounts and IRC logs. It finds and identifies the level of communication between yourself and individuals, and ranks them according to the number of messages and approximate length. gaim already does this with "order buddy list by log size", putting the people important to you above all else.
* You get presented with names, and you get to link them between each other. This should be as easy as dragging from A to B.
* Groups / specialised topics are created. "Friends". "Coworkers". "Linux geeks". Concepts are linked to each other as best as possible, and trust ratings are given to the groups on specific subjects. I'd trust linux geeks & coworkers to tell me about hardware, but not friends.
* In some fashion, if at all possible, the application communicates with my contacts and gets any details they feel like providing: ebay usernames, username @ site.com records in firefox, etc.
* When I look on ebay / amazon, I query my network of contacts for information about whatever I'm looking at - seller, product, etc. (SPARQL + jabber?)

How hard would it be to create an suite of components to perform all of these tasks? Extensions in firefox to expose data in there, data mungers to talk to MSN, gaim, etc or parse the logs (or maybe hijack google desktop search), gaim to communicate with my close contacts, a decent triplestore to handle it all (one that *doesn't* get integrated into my browser, I don't need a bloaty browsing experience).

Recent development

News and Summer of Code updates.

Hurrah for the gaim-vv branch being merged back into the code!

A summary of where gaim is headed:

The “pencils down” date for the Summer of Code was September 1st. Here’s a list of some of the spectacular things the Summer of Code students accomplished during their two months.

Rendezvous Plugin (Juanjo Molinero Horno) – Wrote a protocol plugin (PRPL) that communicates with Apple’s iChat using the Bonjour protocol. The Bonjour protocol uses multicast DNS to automatically discover other Bonjour users on your local network. The PRPL currently uses the Howl library for multicast DNS, but we’d like to switch to using Avahi in the future. This in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
D-Busified gaim-remote (Piotr Zielinski) – Added D-Bus bindings to Gaim which allow other D-Bus aware programs to interact with Gaim. Removed the old, socked-based gaim-remote executable. It is being replaced by a python script that communicates with Gaim via D-Bus. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
Improved Perl Scripting (John Kelm) – Fixed the problems with our Perl interpreter and added support for lots of Gaim’s newer functionality. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
UPnP NAT Traversal (Adam J. Warrington) – Gaim will now talk to your router and arrange for certain ports to be forwarded to your computer when doing file transfers. This should greatly improve file transfer success rates. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
Gadu-Gadu Support (Bartosz Oler) – Our Gadu-Gadu protocol plugin is now using a much more recent version of libgadu. Many many improvements were made, and this protocol plugin is now working very well. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
SIP/SIMPLE (Thomas Butter) – We now have a working protocol plugin for doing IM over a SIP connection, compatable with kphone, iptel.org and sipgate.de. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
ICQ File Transfer (Jonathan Clark) – ICQ file transfer turned out to be pretty easy, since new versions of ICQ use the same file transfer protocol as AIM. After Jonathan got that working, he went on to add support for proxying a file through AOL’s file transfer proxy servers, and made lots of other improvements to the file transfer code used by both AIM and ICQ. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim. Some of his changes also made it into earlier releases of Gaim.
Music Messaging (Christian Muise) – Music Messaging is a Gaim plugin that allows collaborative musical score editing. It uses the SoC DBus Gaim project to link Gaim with a score editor that is geared to use this functionality. This requires the DBus plugin to be operational. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
SMS PC-to-mobile routing over Bluetooth (Mel Dooki) – This project does not releate directly to Gaim, but we thought it was neat. Mel wrote a Java client that runs on a computer. The user types an SMS, the client transfers the message to a cell phone via Bluetooth, then another program on the cell phone transmits the SMS. See the SMS Routing over Bluetooth webpage for more information.
Crazy Chat (Charlie Stockman) – TODO
Doodle (Andrew Dieffenbach) – Created a “whiteboard” system for Gaim and used it to implement Yahoo!’s Doodle protocol. It may need a little more work before it’s completely compatable with current Yahoo! clients, but it works fine between two Gaim users. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
Collaborative Code Editor (Chisthian Kim) – TODO

See more progress on: Fix gaim

Heh: Google is *so* doing this goal

I wonder what he’ll be able to do if he can get a few more googlers using their 20% project time on gaim?

Google’s just hired Sean Egan (the main developer of Gaim open IM client), just the same day Yahoo! and Microsoft plan to link their respective proprietary IM networks.” From the post: “While Yahoo! and Microsoft link their proprietary networks for Instant Messaging, Google bets on Open Protocols to make information universally accessible … Currently, Google uses XMPP/Jabber specs, but they claim to be supporting open server-to-server federation, and work “to hear from other people in the communications industry about how best to build a federation model that is open, scalable”. In fact, there are this month several tests with firms like EarthLink, Sipphone or PeopleCall.

Article

See more progress on: Fix gaim

Perl: So, anyway...

I finally compiled gaim-1.5.0 with perl support. Holy Fucking Shit.

I even got it to respond to incoming/outgoing message signals. One lunch break soon, I’m going to have something actually working :D

I’m also eying Net::Jabber from a distance to cut out the middleman of gaim and provide a UI-less resource of some kind: daniel.oconnor@gmail.com/search

I don’t know if I should just hijack an instance of gaim for it, compiled so you can run multiple instances, or if I should run with Net::Jabber.

But, it’s early, I just rode my bike in the rain to work and I should probably actually do some!

See more progress on: Learn Perl

Net_XMPP / Net_Jabber

Net_XMPP possibilities :)

Net_Jabber / Net_XMPP & Nodel

It doesn't exist yet.

It Should.

Other toolkits I'd kill for

• Services_Atom
  
  
  
  • Services_AtomServer
    
  • Services_AtomClient
    
  • Services_AtomFeed
    
  
  
  
  

Imagine:
Easily being able to query your database, webservices, or more via an instant message. To me, it's bring back the command line to the real time web.


In other news, I've spotted what looks to be a highly interesting thing to play with in python, Nodel.

If I can get past today's workload, I feel some tinkering coming along :)

More SPARQL/Jabber goodness

Link.

Google Talk

Google Talk... talks to GAIM.

The fact that Google Talk is built on Jabber is heartening - it's an open, community owned protocol and google has just weighed in with a client for it. It's sleek, sexy, and does VOIP - no webcam whoring yet though.

Though I like the look and feel of it, I don't need Yet Another IM Client, so I'm really fucking happy I can just use GAIM and consolidate my entire online communication experience into one client.

Now I'll never have to put up with MSN's servers being down. Muhahaha.

Rather pleased at the moment with this, we'll see how it plays out with the rest of the world - will this be an alpha geek early adopter trend that doesn't penetrate into the dimmer regions of the teenage chatter psyche [due to lack of emotions to annoy the fuck out of people with]?

Time will tell, but I'm pretty happy with it.

Oh, and my new Google Desktop Search 2.0.