After gathering dust for a few months in some deep and dark corner of my hard disk, my vCard-based Extended Presence plugin for Openfire is now publicly available here.

This weekend, mblsha and I had a coding sprint to make Psi XMPP-compatible, hoping to be in time for the XMPP interop event. Although we didn’t make it physically to the event, we still managed to get Psi compliant.

I have to confess, i’m kind of a fan of very simple Jabber clients that do not overwhelm you with menuitems, toolbars, and options. This is why i like clients such as Google Talk and iChat so much. I always hoped Psi could one day be such a simple client, but the fact is that we have a very broad userbase, of which many are power-users that do not want to give up any option or feature whatsoever. I never really understood why people needed to send plain messages (instead of chats) in IM, why there is such a thing as ‘Extended Away’ and ‘Free for chat’ in a chat system where you have status messages, why someone would want to hide contacts that are ‘Away’, and the list goes on. However, we’ve had many discussions about this before, and the conclusion is always that someone on this planet wants this, so we never touched these (IMO) silly features. Until now …

Exactly one year after we finished it, our book ‘The First 10 Prolog Programming Contests’ is now freely downloadable. On the home page of the book, you will also find the source code of all solutions presented in the book. Below are some pictures of the ‘deluxe’ edition of the book, hand-made by my mom.

The Psi feature frenzy continues! With my PhD draft text delivered last week, I finally had some more time over the weekend to implement some neat stuff. And not just any stuff: after many years of being blamed for not keeping up with the times, we finally have support for JEP-0045 (Multi User Chat) in our mainline development branch. Sure, maybe some small aestetic modifications can still be done here and there, but all of the functionality should be there. This means you don’t have any excuse whatsoever to be anti-social anymore, so start joining all the fun chatrooms such as psi@conference.jabber.ru.

As some of you probably know, the upcoming 0.11 version of Psi will have remote controlling capabilities. For those of you for which this is new information, or for people that have a hard time imagining what this feature exactly does, I created a screencast (requires QuickTime) showcasing the current list of available commands (and more).