The official Twitter for Mac app gives a great interface for Twitter: lightweight, compact, no bloat, and it looks great. Unfortunately, amongst the hundreds of Twitter clients already existing, I couldn't find anything similar for Linux or Windows. Instead of creating yet another client (which Twitter doesn't like anyway), I did a bit of Qt WebKit coding, and created a small desktop client around the (current) Twitter Mobile Web interface. Update: The mobile Twitter website was updated, and doesn't work as well anymore with TwitCoop. I will try to upgrade TwitCoop to work with the new interface, but it is currently not clear whether this is at all possible.

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Since I couldn’t find a bot that automatically retweets statuses using the native Twitter Retweet API (all I found was RSS pipes that prefixed messages with "RT"), I created one myself. Retjilp is a (Ruby) script that logs into Twitter, scans the statuses of the contacts you are following, and retweets the statuses matching specified words. The Swift Twitter feed shows the script in action, retweeting all Swift and XMPP related tags from the Swift developers. You can get Retjilp from the Git repository (or from GitHub).

I've recently been experimenting with using Eclipse CDT as IDE for Swift development. One of the handy things is that Eclipse CDT has support for parsing compiler error messages, allowing you to quickly navigate to the failing source code line by simply clicking on the error message. Although Eclipse CDT supports all the compilers we use for Swift out of the box, I was still missing the easy navigation for fixing failing CPPUnit tests. Since the error parser (just like almost everything else from Eclipse) is extensible, I wrote a small plugin for parsing CPPUnit error messages.

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Because Openfire has been hogging too much of my limited el-tramo.be server resources lately, and because I don’t need a beast of an XMPP server for only 2 users, I decided to replace it by the lightweight Prosody. The migration went flawless, with the help of two tools: Sleek Migrate, and a Prosody XEP-0227 Importer.

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As much as I like CppUnit for writing C++ unit tests, I still prefer using Qt's built-in QtTest module for Qt-based projects. This avoids a dependency on an external library, lowering the threshold for running and writing unit tests. Unfortunately, QtTest is very basic, and lacks some useful features such as automatic test registration and running multiple test suites in one test binary. In order to improve QtTest's usability, I started creating some macros and classes that fill in some of the gaps, and bundled them into QtTestUtil.

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For a while now, I've been looking for a simple wiki to manage my personal notes and to do some basic shared editing. After looking through the vast number of wikis on WikiMatrix and still not finding what I was looking for, I ended up doing what hundreds have done before me: wrote my own wiki, and threw it on the pile of exitsing ones.

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I created a Fink package for MP4Box, the multimedia packager from the GPAC project. MP4Box can be used for manipulating (e.g. muxing, demuxing) multimedia files such as MP4, 3GP, AVI, MPG, TS, ...

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I have been looking for a Linux system tray application to notify me of new mail on my GMail account. Unfortunately, all the notifiers I found either did not run on Linux, or had dependencies I was unable to meet on my machine (because I lack system administrator privileges). This is why I wrote LGMTray, a very basic GMail notifier, with very few dependencies.

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After a short hiatus, I finally resumed work on my new Jabber/XMPP client project, which I christened `Greem'. The main goal of the project is to create a mobile Jabber/XMPP client for the Qtopia platform. The nice thing about Qtopia is that its target audience keeps on expanding: besides running on the GreenPhone (of which Trolltech was kind enough to provide me with one), Qtopia has recently been ported to the Neo 1973 (OpenMoko), and even Windows CE and Windows Mobile. In this post, I briefly describe what the expectations and the goals are for Greem, and how Psi fits into the picture.

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A month or 2 ago, I applied for the Qtopia Greenphone Innovation Grant Program, an initiative from TrollTech to promote the development of applications for their Linux-based Qtopia Greenphone. I probably won't surprise anyone by saying that I sent in a proposal about writing a good, cross-platform, mobile Jabber/XMPP client. Anyway, I was very excited to receive a mail from TrollTech yesterday, stating that my proposal was accepted by their review panel! As an applicant, I will be receiving a shiny new Greenphone, together with a Qtopia SDK to develop against. Deadline for submitting my application: October 31st. Let the coding begin.

There have been some small bug fixes since the previous announcement of AtoMail, so it's time for another snapshot. Since the script only is receiving minor tweaks and bugfixes lately, it is probably advisable to keep track of the Git development version from now on.

I noticed MOST on Debian Package of the Day earlier today. It is an advanced pager, able to display compressed and binary files, supporting multiple windows, ... Because I couldn't find it in Fink, I created a new package for it.

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If it wasn't clear by now, I'm pretty addicted to RSS. Some people disagree, and see RSS as evil because of the extra traffic that active polling of the feeds introduces. To me, it's the easiest way of publishing news, anyone can set up a feed on about any host, and because of the polling nature it allows for easier scripting than other solutions. Besides, with web-based solutions like Google Reader, the extra traffic can be shared across many users anyway. The only frustration I am left with is that not every webpage or software package that interests me has an RSS feed. I wrote AtoMail to have an RSS feed of projects (or webpages) that have mailinglists instead of RSS feeds. In addition to this script, I just released a script called SVNFeed, which I use to monitor Subversion activity of projects that don't have an RSS-enabled Subversion Web interface. By monitoring the tags dir of a project, I can even get a more coarse grained granularity of updates, mostly up to the release. Both scripts might be consolidated in the future, possibly together with even more RSS generation scripts I have lying around ;-)

Shortly after the initial version and a few subsequent bugfix versions, AtoMail 0.4 is now available. This release allows you to retrieve mail from various different sources: stdin, local mailboxes (in different formats), POP3 (+SSL), IMAP4(+SSL), and NNTP usenet newsgroups.

AtoMail is a Python script that converts mail into an RSS feed. This is for example useful for tracking announcement mailinglists in your favorite RSS reader, if no classic RSS feed is available. This script is aimed at people who do not want to make use of services such as mail2rss.org (e.g. in order to have more control, for more reliability, privacy, ...), or do not have the resources to set up a service such as mail2rss.

I just released some very preliminary code for another toy project, PHKP. PHKP is an implementation of the OpenPGP HTTP Keyserver Protocol (HKP) in PHP. It allows people to serve a PGP keyserver on most webservers, provided that the webserver has GnuPG and PHP with exec() enabled. It supports all the basic keyserver operations (searching, retrieving, and submitting keys).

TuneController is a modular plugin-based Qt interface for talking to media players such as iTunes, XMMS, and WinAmp. The provided functionality is currently limited to notifying of player state and song changes, but other features (such as remote controlling, queueing, ...) will be added in the future.

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