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IETF process

In the blog at xmpp.org, stpeter says:

It appears that the best we can do is update the XMPP specs as we have been doing, resulting in revised specifications that reflect our community’s implementation and deployment experience but that are still at the Proposed Standard level.
[IETF Advancement]

I think there are at least two more things we can do:

  1. Push the other working groups to move forward; if they don’t know anyone cares, they might get complacent.
  2. Find ways to remove some of the references. For example, GSSAPI and SASL Digest.

We needn’t just accept that we are powerless.

2007 06 11 Joe Hildebrand Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Pushing

We have a friend who is known to say:

Q: What do you do when you see someone on the edge?
A: Give them a little push!

Stpeter is thinking about moving to WordPress. I thought I’d point out to him that it has pretty great import capabilities, including RSS. It might be worth a shot to see what it would do by just giving it your full RSS feed…

2007 05 31 Joe Hildebrand Blogging Comments (0) Permalink

Move to WordPress

Now that WordPress officially supports Atom 1.0, I’ve moved this blog over to a new machine. I’ve tried to maintain as much backward-compatibility with permalinks and feeds as possible, but I’m sure I’ve missed some stuff. Let me know if anything is still broken.Hopefully, this means I’ll be blogging more, as well.

2007 05 29 Joe Hildebrand Blogging Comments (4) Permalink

Jabber-Net moves to Google Code

One of my personal open source projects is Jabber-Net, an XMPP library for .Net, written in C#. I have just moved the Jabber-Net project to Google Code, due to JabberStudio having shut down.

New project URL: http://code.google.com/p/jabber-net/

Subversion repository details: http://code.google.com/p/jabber-net/source

New mailing list URL: http://groups.google.com/group/jabber-net

New mailing list email address: mailto:jabber-net@googlegroups.com

(Please subscribe yourself, even if you were on the old mailing list.)

2007 03 21 Joe Hildebrand .Net Comments Off Permalink

Scared of “sacred”

Stpeter correctly takes me to task for my glib use of the word “sacred” in my last post:

Well, Joe, I voted too, but I can think of plenty of things more sacred in a free society than voting: [list of things that are important to me too]

Aside from Independence Day (which we could quibble over how directly Peter’s list applies since he calls out the Constitution, not the Declaration of Independence), none of those things have a national holiday directly associated with them either. I suppose I was trying to comment on the things that we do choose to make national holidays. It seems to me that the enforcement of some of the holidays that we have in place is less important to our freedoms than voting.

Some of the current holidays I see as “a time to reflect on X”, where X is some set of people or ideals that correctly deserve veneration. Perhaps what I’m actually suggesting that the folks that fought for equality of voting rights deserve that kind of respect; I can’t think of a better way to honor their memories than to reflect on the issues of the day, carefully weigh my options, and exercise the right that they fought for so desperately.

2006 11 07 Joe Hildebrand Uncategorized Comments Off Permalink

High voter turnout

Apparently, there was unexpectedly high voter turnout in Douglas County, CO today. During my 2.5 hour wait, I sent this text to my wife:

Line around the block
Chilly fingers wait to vote
Enfranchise me now!

Election day should just be a holiday; is there anything that should be more sacred in a free country than careful reflection on one’s choices at the ballot?

2006 11 07 Joe Hildebrand Personal Comments Off Permalink

Daddy, I got cider in my ear

One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you’re going to wind up with an ear full of cider.

…

Daddy! I got cider in my ear.

– Sky Masterson

Since we were in Portland for the XMPP interop event, the guys at Jive Software invited us all over for a beer tasting. They have an XBox 360, and one of their favorite games is Fight Night. Since I just got a 360 last week (along with Fight Night), Matt Tucker suggested a friendly wager (Matt: “I’ve only played three times. It’ll be fun”). We decided to play for a blog entry with a link to the other’s blog.

Roughly 30 seconds later, my fighter was on the canvas. Apparently, Matt’s a “natural”.

And I coulda been a contenda. Sigh.

2006 07 27 Joe Hildebrand Personal Comments Off Permalink

Peter Millard passes away

IMG_0154_1.JPG

I’m still in shock I think. Of course if you read this blog, chances are that you have already heard that Peter Millard (pgm) died Wednesday night. Peter was one of my best friends here in Colorado. I’m not even sure how to go about dealing with him not being around any more.

Peter was instrumental in the success of Jabber, Inc. He was the leader of our server team, and as such was responsible for the development of some of the most innovative features in our last couple of product releases. I could always come to him with a half-baked crazy idea, and he’d turn it into something that not only wasn’t crazy, but could be implemented pretty easily.

PGM was an integral part of the Jabber community, from his leadership on the Jabber Council, to his open source contributions, including Exodus. I had the privilege of working on Exodus with him, and learned more about Win32 from him than I ever wanted to know. :)

PGM was also in a community orchestra with my wife, where he played Tuba. Particularly considering he hadn’t picked up his horn for years prior to that, he was just an amazing musician. He also played twelve-string guitar; I only got to hear that once, unfortunately.

As a man, PGM was on of those that it’s always safe to look up to. You could count on him to not only do the right thing, but to quietly insist on others living up to their potential. He’s left me with a lot to live up to.

Peter is survived by his wife Christina and his daughter Zoe. I got to see them yesterday. Luckily they have a lot of friends here in Denver, so they’ll have lots of support.

Some details of the arrangements:
There will be a memorial service at 7:30pm on Wednesday May 3 2006, at Broomfield United Methodist Church. Directions.

The family has asked that in lieu of flowers, donations can be made to one of these charities in Peter’s name:

RMCC Foundation
1683 Red Poppy Drive, Suite 100
Brighton, CO 80601		 Boulder County Hospital Foundation
P.O. Box 9019
Boulder, CO 80301-9019

Make sure that if you send a check, you put Peter’s name in the comments field.

I thought it might be nice to link to some of the other nice things people from around the world have said about Peter:

If I missed your post, I’m sorry. Please leave a link in the comments.

2006 04 29 Joe Hildebrand Uncategorized Comments (4) Permalink

Plazes in India

If the previous entry was “Are we there”, this is more about “where there is”.

I’ve been doing some cool hacking with Plazes (a social-software geoloc service), using it as a source of location data for publishing with JEP-80 and JEP-112. Yes, I’ll publish source code once I finish up a few bits and bobs.

However, I’m having a hard time tagging my current plaze. None of the map sites I normally use can geocode Indian addresses. Japanese addresses are even harder, but that’s a problem for another day.

The hard part is that addresses seem to be almost as variable as languages. Much like language barriers, there’s probably no politically-viable approach to canonicalization, Esperanto notwithstanding. That’s one of the reasons why the geopriv problem is so hard.

2006 01 09 Joe Hildebrand Protocol Comments Off Permalink

Are we there yet?

I’m at the COMSWARE conference in New Delhi this week, speaking on a panel with several luminaries on the topic “Convergence Nirvana : Are we there yet?”.
“Are we there yet?” is what I wanted to ask everyone after my 24-hour getting-to-India adventure, but everything worked out fine. Even made friends with the crew from my flight, who got to the bar at the hotel about the same time I did.

I thought I’d jot down some notes as I was thinking about the convergence topic. Here are some obvious things that probably need to be converged over the short term:

  • IM
  • E-mail
  • Voice calling
  • Voice mail
  • Identity
  • Authorization

Are we there yet? Not quite. Yes, protocol standardization is one part of that, but with the emergence of XMPP, SIP, Jingle, etc. we’re getting pretty close to having all of the building blocks. What we don’t have yet is converged solutions. At Jabber, Inc., we working toward that converged nirvana, but we’ll need a little while yet to arrive there.

However, once you have the basic functionality in place, keep in ind that every group of users will have a difference set of extensions, integrations, and business logic that they require. As such, ease of extensibility is going to be paramount. Since the sorts of solutions that will be build must include all sorts of state management, asynch network communication, threads, locking, and other hard things, the protocols themselves should be optimized whenever possible if we’re going to have a shot. Yes, I know, you can always hide complexity behind a library. However, if the protocols are too hard, you end up with a limited set of choices for libraries, and the ones that are worth using will be very expensive.

Really, I’m not trying to slam particular protocols here. This is really meant more as a call to action to the completionists, begging those who have a vested interest in the complexity that locks out competition to have a care for the families of the poor application programmers… Please, make the protocols easier so that we have a chance to go home once in a while.

2006 01 09 Joe Hildebrand Public Speaking Comments Off Permalink