ralphm's blog
Thursday, 6 December 2007
Federating social networks workshop
I am a month in my new job at Mediamatic Lab. As part of one of our projects, we are working on having the different instances of anyMeta (a CMS used to build websites like those for PICNIC and Reboot. We want to use open protocols for this. To prevent us from working on our own little island, and noticing the huge buzz on opening up social networking services, I've been pretty busy with organizing a workshop (upcoming) on federating social networks. Next Saturday (8 December) we will get a bunch of smart people together to talk about what it takes to have social networking services, as well as more generic CMSs, work together, so that people are not caught between the numerous walls that are currently in place around each respective garden. My colleague wok wrote a related piece on this: Solving Social Networking Fatigue.
Although it was pretty short notice, there will be a fair number of people from the Dutch social networking crowd, like Robert Gaal of Wakoopa, who chaired the Portable Social Networks session at PICNIC '07. Also, we got two great people over from San Francisco. One of them is David Recordon of SixApart. I met David at Web 2.0 Expo Berlin, where he did a presentation on opening up social networking services. He gave a good overview on the issues and stated that most of the tools are there, and we should just put them together.
The other one is Blaine Cook of Twitter, who I met at XTech 2007 in Paris. In his talk together with Kellan Elliott-McCrea, he went into why XMPP is a great technology to complement HTTP in building online services. Also, we spoke about hooking up social networking sites like Twitter and Jaiku using XMPP. During the summer we discussed the bits and pieces in XMPP (like the publish-subscribe extension) that'd be needed for that. This resulted in my presentation at Web 2.0 Expo Berlin, and the workshop we are doing now.
The day will start off with a couple of presentations and introductions, followed by sessions of discussion (and a lunch). From 17:00h, there'll be a borrel (drink) with a few short higher level presentations for a broader group of people, with less focus on the technical aspects. Afterwards, we'll probably head into the city for some food and stuff.
Unfortunately, because of the short notice and other obligations, a lot of people that really want to come said they can't make it. Maybe we should try and do a follow-up event early next year. For them and anyone interested in all this, we will try to get some live coverage on the #fsn Jaiku channel. All in all, I am pretty excited about doing this event and hope to see you there!
Wednesday, 7 November 2007
Federating Social Networks talk
In a few minutes my presentation on Federating Social Networks on Web 2.0 Expo Berlin will start. I will talk about exchanging (changes to) social objects between sites like Jaiku, Twitter and all the others using open formats like Atom on top of XMPP Publish-Subscribe. Here are the slides.
Thursday, 1 November 2007
Happenings
The last eight months must have been the most hectic ones I have experienced. This started out with my leaving the TU/e and starting at Jaiku. Apart from microblogging effectively killing any urge to write in this blog, there weren't many dull moments since then.
The most important happening last summer, that I've documented on Jaiku but not here, was the birth of my daughter Birgit on 28 June. I don't think I've ever been more proud and happy than at the instance I first held her. Watching her grow up and discover the world around her is awesome. Her smiles make every day a joy.
About a month ago, it was announced that Jaiku has been acquired by Google. Many people contacted me to congratulate me on this news, and I'd like to thank you all! I feel it is a compliment to the great team I've had the pleasure of working with and to our community of users and application developers that helped made Jaiku what it is today.
Naturally, the acquisition didn't happen in a day, so leading up to that there were a lot of questions that kept us and our families busy for a while. What will happen? Will we need to move? When? Where? Exciting and Exhausting at the same time. Eventually the deal obviously took place, and most of the team have left for the Bay Area for a few months, while some didn't. I was one of the guys that was not included in the acquisition, so I'm not moving after all. We had a great combined Valve/Jaiku/Thinglink new office warming but also Jaiku farewell party, though, and I'd like to say thanks to all my former colleagues for the great experience it has been. For the forseeable future, I will be associated with Jaiku, the service, but not in any official capacity.
So what now? As of today I am officially employed by Mediamatic Lab, where I will continue work on XMPP publish-subscribe technologies and open standards. More on that later, though.
Friday, 25 May 2007
Ralph at Jaiku
Before today, my last entry here was three months ago. What has happened since? In short I stopped working for the university (thanks guys, I really enjoyed my time with you) and are now working for Jaiku since halfway March, while staying in Eindhoven. My tasks are mostly focussed on adding IM support and in general working on XMPP, standards and Twisted in our service. Obviously, I now keep a life stream which might explain the lack of entries on by regular blog. Or maybe it is all the travelling I've been doing lately.
In that entry from February, I was contemplating going to XTech because of the interesting Jabber related talks. I did go, but basically replaced Jyri and gave a presentation on Jaiku myself. There are a lot of exciting things to write about this trip, and Jaiku as well. I might do that on the plane back from Helsinki, where I am now for a gathering at Jaiku HQ.
Next week I'll be at Reboot 9.0 which like XTech gathers a lot of interesting people and already has a nice line-up of talks. Hope to see you there!
Another exciting thing that I didn't mention here before is my upcoming fatherhood! Irma is due in July and that is approaching quite fast. More on that later, of course.
SoC blogs on Planet Jabber
I added the feeds of the students that have one of the
Jabber-related Google Summer of
Code projects, on cue by 
stpeter. The blogs
are marked with the image on the right that I kindly ripped and remixed
from the Planet SoC
logo. Obviously we expect plenty of updates throughout the summer and
wish the students lots of fun!
Thursday, 22 February 2007
XTech 2007 loves Jabber
As my employment with the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven is coming to a natural end on 1 March, and I was not sure where I would be working in May, I did not answer the call for participation for XTech 2007. Turns out there are at least three Jabber related talks in the schedule that was made available just now!
Blaine Cook and Kellan Elliot-McCrea will have a talk titled
Jabber:
Social Software for Robots
promoting the use of
XMPP to let chat bots be an avatar for web applications.
Massimiliano Mirra will talk about Real-time
user-to-user web with Mozilla and XMPP
, explaining
how browser based applications can be spiced up with real-time
bidirectional structured communication by using XMPP to communicate
with the application's backend.
And finally, Jyri Engeström will talk about Jaiku
— rich presence
. I have been visiting Jaiku HQ last month and they have
a very nice application going on there. The summary does not tell, but
Jaiku uses XMPP, as Mika Raento will explain
at FOSDEM this
weekend.
All in on very exciting stuff, and there's a lot of other interesting talks as well, so may need to consider going to Paris this spring.
Friday, 9 February 2007
FOSDEM 2007 Jabber devroom schedule published
Back in November I posted
a call for presence (haha) for the Jabber developer
room at FOSDEM 2007. But this year, with the help of Peter
Saint-André, the hunt for speakers has been far more
aggressive than previous editions. I must say that this has resulted in
a great, packed, line-up and I am sure that many people (currently)
from outside the will be interested in what will be presented. Loki has
put the schedule online earlier today.
To give a quick overview, on Saturday Peter will kick off with a Jabber 101, targetted at getting developers acquainted with Jabber technologies. Heiner Wolf follows with a presentation on Virtual Presence, a way to meet up on webpages. Ian Paterson will try to reach the Rich Internet Application crowd that now uses JSON, Comet or AJAX for browser-server communications, and show how you can put XMPP to use in this arena. The day is concluded by two presentations on the Tigase server implentation: Artur Hefczyc will talk on Tigase itself and Diana Cionoiu will explain how Yate hooks up Jingle with Tigase to build tomorrow's open telephony networks.
For those that manage to get up bright and early on Sunday morning, I will let visiting developers dig right into what Peter has touched upon the day before. Using Twisted, I will explain how to actually develop asynchronous applications that communicate using XMPP and act as a Jabber client or server-side component. Then this session will transform into a mini-sprint and the visitors will rattle their keyboards to crunch out running Python code. Bring your own laptops!
Around lunch we give Robert McQueen and Peter a Jingle to get us up to speed on rich media streaming, and proceed with Mickaël Rémond of ejabberd fame on OneTeam, a Mozilla/XUL based Jabber client application. Mika Raento takes us to the mobile world with his talk on Jaiku, that combines rich presence and group messaging on the web and on the mobile. Then we close the room to go Peter Saint-André's talk in the huge Janson room on secure communications. Be sure to check out the interview. To allow for some extra time for answering questions after that talk, we reopen the developers' room for a Q&A session, and possibly a few 5 min. lightning talks, and then close up shop.
Friday, 17 November 2006
Jabber @ FOSDEM 2007
The Free and Open Source Developers' Europe Meeting, FOSDEM, is up for its seventh incarnation. This time the event will take place the 24 and 25th of February 2007 in Brussels. And again, the Jabber community will have presence there.
I just got confirmation for a developers' room and booth. The devroom was pretty crowded last year during some presentations, so this year we got a somewhat larger room: 48 seats. The room will be available during Saturday 14:00-19:00 and Sunday 09:00-18:00.
I will not go and fill three slots again, so I request people from
our community to propose presentations, tutorials, discussions, etc.
Almost anything that uses or explains XMPP technologies goes. Contact
me to apply
or find out more.
We are also looking into doing a second interoperability event around FOSDEM. Suggestions on possible venues are welcome.
Thursday, 5 October 2006
Practical Transparency
Tim Bray talks about Practical Transparency, or how to publish financials in such a way that every interested party may receive the information in a timely fashion. Regular Atom feeds are served using HTTP, which requires polling. This might introduce delays up to half an hour with regular news readers.
As one of the solutions he proposes Atom over XMPP, and refers to it as elegant but fancy. I would like to think of it to be very much like the services by major news providers they still call 'telex', at least over in here in The Netherlands. All subscribers (news papers, online news sites, broadcasters) to the telex get streams of news items, all plain-text. Atom over XMPP is a way to pass on structured news, including markup, meta data and enclosures in much the same fashion.
Atom over XMPP works using the publish-subscribe
XMPP enhancement protocol over a regular Jabber network. So what Tim
describes as a persistent connection, is really a some client
application connected to its home Jabber server, and that home server
is connected to the service hosting the publish-subscribe node(s) for
this particular telex
service.
This should be pretty easy to deploy. Just set up a Jabber server, add a general publish-subscribe service like Idavoll, set up the node(s) and write a few lines of code to send out the publish requests. This is how I publish my blog to Mimír, too.
Thursday, 31 August 2006
Update
It has been a while, so I hope you still remember me! So what have I been up to?
Most of my coding efforts have gone into the XMPP support for the Twisted networking framework. Apart from some minor issues, I worked on finalizing the SASL/TLS support for initiating entities, such as XMPP clients.
I introduced an abstraction for the different steps needed to initialize an XML stream to the point that XML stanzas can be exchanged. For example, for XMPP clients, these are: TLS negotiation, SASL authentication, resource binding and session establishment. I called the abstraction initializer. So, when connecting to the receiving entity, a list of initializers is iterated, and when all have succesfully completed, the stream is ready for free exchange of XML stanzas. Another example of an initializer could be stream compression.
So, this work, along with a usage example, is now in a branch, waiting for approval to be merged. When merged, I will start to work on implementing the receiving end of this functionality. Which brings me to the other project I've started working on: Pretzel, a Python XMPP server based on Twisted. I have been wanting to this for a while now, and during my holiday break, I met a bunch of awesome people, and started brainstorming. Read the announcement by Boris.
Then, I worked with stpeter on our tutorial
for EuroOSCON, 18 September 2006. This should be fun, and more people
is better: sign
up now!. EuroOSCON then goes on until 21 September with the
regular sessions. Wednesday is Jabber day with two presentations: one
by stpeter
and one by Florian
Holzhauer. On the same day, the Jabber Software Foundation will
have a booth for Dot Org Day
, where you can meet several
Jabber Rock Stars.
During the preparations for the tutorial, I have worked on adding Atom support to the aggregator that feeds Mimír. I also did an actual, very belated, first release for my publish-subscribe service component Idavoll, while transferring the project and host it myself using Trac.
Finally, I got to extend my membership of the JSF and have applied for a third term of the Jabber Council. Well, that's it. More soon!
