Summer of Code is approaching, and there’s been a lot of comments from people on the Pidgin developer mailing list. Most of peoples submissions are from the list at http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/FutureSOCProjects but I’ve been thinking about a few ideas of my own that I’d love to see in Pidgin.

1. Better Windows 7 integration.
   Windows 7 has new jumplists and preview panes and that file-transfer progress thing. Skype uses them all on Win7 and it looks pretty nifty. Would love to see that in there
2. SIP protocol plugin
   With the new voice/video API in Pidgin, there’s been a few requests to have SIP (rather than SIMPLE, which is already in Pidgin). There’s a Sophia-SIP prpl at http://sofia-sip.sourceforge.net/ssip-gst.html which would be a great starting point
3. An over-the-net remote control for Pidgin/Finch
   I started working on this one myself with a friend, starting with a web interface for Pidgin to use it with the iPhone, and working on a prpl that would let you remotely sign into, say, your home Pidgin and use it from work, while logging the conversations at home and without signing out of your home accounts. (I should really put the source code for that online sometime)
4. A plugins site a la adiumxtras.com or addons.mozilla.org
   Some kind of plugin that can update other plugins would be handy too. I have a lot of users of various plugins of mine that are using old versions, just because they didn’t know a newer one existed. If there was an autoupdate as well as a single place with all the plugins, that would be super-duper

Anyway, that’s my ideas. Anyone have any others?

There’s just been a blog post by the Facebook developers to say that they’re finally allowing XMPP on Facebook. Here’s the details:

1. Create a new XMPP account in your favourite XMPP client, eg Adium or Pidgin
2. Use your Facebook username in the ‘username’ field. If you don’t have a username get one at http://facebook.com/username
3. Use ‘chat.facebook.com’ (without the quotes) in the ‘domain’ field
4. Enter in your password
5. Uncheck the Require SSL/TLS settings
6. Check the ‘Allow plaintext auth over unencrypted streams’

You should be good to go

I’ve been helping out Maiku (who’s the Google summer of code student who was tasked with getting voice/video working in Pidgin) to get pidgin-vv working on Windows. We’ve done lots of playing around for the last wee while, but we’ve finally managed to get it working on Windows. Just so you all believe me, here’s a teaser screencast video of me giving Maiku a call.

Cool huh! So far only XMPP (and Skype, kinda) are working but Maiku is hard at work to get all the other protocols working too. Yay!

For those people who upgraded to v1.60 of the pidgin-facebookchat plugin, you’ll probably notice that the Facebook groups have made their way into your Pidgin buddylist.

Oddly enough, this has spawned a looong thread of people who aren’t so happy with the new change. I thought it would be best to blog about why and what happened to get us to this stage and what we’re doing about it.

What happened is that we got reports of a major crash appearing whenever 32-bit (and Windows) users opened a conversation window or received a chat from someone. This was because our kludgy way of dealing with a limitation of timestamps from json-glib ended up overflowing. At the same time, we had been sitting on fixes for profile pictures/buddy icons, as well as status messages needing a new way to update.

The other issue was that I’ve been looking after my unwell fiancée all week, after several doctors trips, after-hours doctors trips and even a visit to the swine flu processing centre in Christchurch. So when I started getting email notifications of bug reports about the crashes, it was the final straw for me, and I hastily pushed out a new version…. completely forgetting that we had the new group/friend list’s code in there.

That said, we hadn’t had much feedback about the new groups stuff until now so we weren’t to know that everyone would hate it as much as they do.

So where to from here? Well, we want to come up with a solution that leaves everyone happy, while still allowing for using the new groups/friends list code. My idea is to have a toggle for the setting. Casey Ho, the other developer, says that I’m not allowed to offer that solution to people, as we’ll end up with an unstable situation. Instead, he’s adding support for hiding/showing different groups as well as the online/offline per-group setting that Facebook has. This should end up with the same result, just a different way of getting there.

So blame lies with me, I’m afraid, for all the groups mess. My apologies, but rest assured, we are working on ways to ‘fix the problem’ for you all

(Also, if you feel like making a donation to help pay for my fiancée’s medication so that we don’t have to keep going back to the doctors so that messes like this don’t happen in the future, I’m always grateful)

I accidentally looked at my syslog messages on my home (Gentoo) Linux server and found that there were thousands of SSH connection attempts from all over the world: people trying to brute-force my root password. The worst bit was that it was filling up my logs and causing lots of things to die when the computer ran out of disk-space. It needed a bit of playing around to get this to stop, but in case you run across the same situation, I’ve documented what I did:

• Make sure you have the tcpd USE-flag on net-misc/openssh. If you don’t, the easiest way to add it is with the command echo "net-misc/openssh tcpd" >> /etc/portage/package.use
• Emerge fail2ban
• If you’re using syslog-ng, you need to configure it to log sshd logs to a different place (reduces load on the server) by adding the following lines to /etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf
  filter f_sshd {match('^sshd\[[0-9]+\]:'); };
destination sshd { file("/var/log/sshd.log"); };
log { source(src); filter(f_sshd); destination(sshd); flags(final); }
• Enable the ssh-tcpwrapper setting in /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf, checking that the logpath is pointing to your log file. It should end up looking something like
  
[ssh-tcpwrapper]
enabled = true
filter = sshd
action = hostsdeny
logpath = /var/log/sshd.log

• Set up the hosts allow/deny files (if you don’t have them) by pumping out the following commands to bash
  
touch /etc/hosts.allow
touch /etc/hosts.deny
chmod 644 /etc/hosts.allow
chmod 644 /etc/hosts.deny

• Reload syslog-ng /etc/init.d/syslog-ng reload, restart openssh /etc/init.d/sshd restart, and start fail2ban /etc/init.d/fail2ban start && rc-update add fail2ban default

That should do it. I also recommend disabling the root account and disabling password authentication in your /etc/ssh/sshd_config file.

So hi everyone.  I’ve always had a few ideas that I’ve wanted to tell the world about and have started up this blog.

In case you didn’t already know, I’m Eion, also known online as BigBrownChunx.  For my day-job, I work on popular NZ websites such as MyJobSpace (myjobspace.co.nz), DineOut (www.dineout.co.nz) and Vorb (www.vorb.org.nz).  But by-night, I work on the Facebook plugin for Pidgin and the Skype plugin for Pidgin as well as helping out my fiancé on her gardening website at www.littlesliceofeden.co.nz

Anyway, I hope to be like every other whimsical blog-poster out there and post two or three times a week.  Here’s hoping I can keep it up