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.

Although I love the thrill of speaking in public, I unfortunately don’t get to do it as often as I used to (once, maybe twice a year lately). The few times I do speak, though, I’ld like it to be as good as possible. That’s why I was very interested in O’Reilly’s announcement of Scott Berkun’s Confessions of a Public Speaker, and so I put the book on my shopping list right away. Not having heard of the author before, I was hoping for the best (light, interesting, with a touch of “funny”), but expecting the worst (“I am your presentation God; people sell their own mother to hear my voice; although you are not worthy, I will lower myself to your level and give some insight in why I am so fantastic.”). After receiving the book in the mail, I read it from the first page to the last in merely one day (a new personal record). Needless to say the book exceeded my expectations.

When I was a kid, I used to be fascinated by Swiss clocks and watches (actually, mostly anything that was made in Switzerland). However, my attention in watches seems to have faded shortly after I got my very own black & red strapped Swatch: only a few years later, I replaced the Swatch with a digital Casio with built-in calculator, because it looked flashy and cool. I have to admit that the watches I wore (if any) haven’t really improved much since then. However, since I recently came to be without a timepiece again, I took the opportunity to read up on watches before buying a new one. I ordered the first well-rated book on the subject I could find, which happened to be Gene Stone’s The Watch. It turns out that this book was one of the most entertaining books I recently read, and I must admit I have become a watch fanatic ever since I read it.

Although the primary focus of XMPP: The Definitive Guide is explaning the XMPP protocol and all its extensions through text and illustrations, we also included a few Python code examples to help people get started with implementing their own ideas. In fact, we devoted a whole chapter to building an XMPP application, starting out with a simple bot implementation, but gradually extending the application into a full server component. For people who want to try this out for themselves, we’re releasing the source code of all code examples, including a simple echo bot, and different variants of the CheshiR microblogging platform XMPP interface.

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.

I added a DocBook XSL customization layer to my DocBook Kit that outputs an HTML/PHP version of the document that automatically integrates with a WordPress blog. The stylesheet also (optionally) adds a link to the downloadable PDF of the document.

Adam Goucher and Tim Riley (Director of QA at Mozilla) announced a few months ago that they are putting together a Beautiful Testing book for O’Reilly. I took the opportunity to write a chapter about testing in the context of XMPP (more specifically, about testing protocol implementations in Swift), and just submitted the final draft for technical review. The book is expected to be released this August.

When I started writing XMPP: The Definitive Guide, I switched from LaTeX to DocBook as my writing tool, mainly because DocBook was O’Reilly’s suggested format. After a few months of writing with DocBook, I started getting quite attached to the format: not only does it force you to separate presentation from content, the strict XML format allows you to easily write tools to transform and validate your document. For example, for the XMPP book, we had several short Python scripts that checked whether the stanzas used in the book were well-formed, whether all web URLs were valid, … Today, I use DocBook for practically all of my documents. Because getting a DocBook environment up requires putting together quite a few pieces from different places, I created a “DocBook kit” to be able to start writing a new DocBook project without much hassle.