So it\u2019s been a fair few months since my last post and I thought I\u2019d try get back into it with an update of what\u2019s going on in the world of IM and Pidgin plugins and stuff.<\/p>\n
In case you didn\u2019t know the Christchurch earthquakes<\/a> have been affecting my life for the past few months. These are pics<\/a> from a walk around the block around my house. Over 7000 aftershocks and still going!<\/p>\n So what does this mean for the Pidgin plugins?<\/strong> So what\u2019s the state of the Skype plugin?<\/strong> So what\u2019s the state of the Facebook plugin?<\/strong> What about the other plugins?<\/strong> So yup, that\u2019s an update. While I\u2019m not in the super active development mode I was a year or two ago, I\u2019m still fairly contactable. So if you have any questions, queries, bug reports or feature requests feel free to either contact me, or leave a post in the comments. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So it\u2019s been a fair few months since my last post and I thought I\u2019d try get back into it with an update of what\u2019s going on in the world of IM and Pidgin plugins and stuff. In case you didn\u2019t know the Christchurch earthquakes have been affecting my life for the past few months. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[4,3,5],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3CEsE-1w","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eion.robbmob.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eion.robbmob.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eion.robbmob.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eion.robbmob.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eion.robbmob.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/eion.robbmob.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eion.robbmob.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eion.robbmob.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eion.robbmob.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nFor the most part, not a great deal. Things have slowed down since I\u2019m spending more time of earthquake cleanup and wedding planning rather than coding, but they\u2019re still plodding along. Unfortunately the power-cuts and brown-outs have caused damage to the server machine that I use to build all my plugins (and which runs this website\/blog) and it needs to be rebuilt. Currently it\u2019s running of a live CD of Gentoo since the main partition won\u2019t mount at boot. If you\u2019ve been unable to access the Skype plugin site<\/a> recently, that\u2019s why.<\/p>\n
\nAs mentioned in previous posts, I had started work on a SkypeKit plugin<\/a>. Unfortunately, the terms and conditions completely rule out using the SkypeKit SDK in open-source software and so the SkypeKit protocol would need to be clean-room reverse engineered \u2013 this has been made harder by the added layers of encryption recently added to the SkypeKit protocol. Instead, I\u2019ve been following closely the skype-open-source<\/a> efforts, to create a native Skype protocol plugin for Pidgin, however a lot of people have been having difficulty with it as certificates and other protocol things are out of date with the newest Skype versions. For now, I recommend just using an old version of Skype (eg, v3 or v4 on Windows) along with the skype4pidgin plugin, to keep memory usage down.<\/p>\n
\nWell at the moment, there\u2019s a lot of people having a lot of trouble with the plugin. Things have changed in the \u2018FB HTTP\u2019 protocol and I haven\u2019t had a chance to do anything about it. Unfortunately, Pidgin (well, libpurple mainly) can\u2019t just switch over to using the official FB API\u2019s for login and status messages and stuff since it all relies on having a browser being embedded into the app. It also relies on the browser supporting JavaScript, something which especially can\u2019t be assumed when using Finch from a terminal. There\u2019s some code in source control at the moment that uses the login system from the HTTP chat method to allow the Pidgin app to do the XMPP login and all that jazz without any kind of user interaction, but that probably breaks a lot of FB terms and conditions. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
\nYeah, I write one or two other plugins<\/a> for Pidgin\/libpurple \ud83d\ude09 A lot of them are being integrated into the Purple Plugin Pack<\/a> but I\u2019ll list them out here with a brief status update:<\/p>\n\n