Connecting Bitlbee to ????

Have been messing with Bitlbee for the last few weeks, every since I ran across the note that the test version of Bitlbee had Twitter capability and that Facebook had a Jabber interface. A couple things that I've learned:

• I follow too many people on Twitter


• one side effect of the Jabber interface is that you can tell when your friends are checking in on Facebook

So far, I've used Bitlbee and JIRC to connect various services together: Facebook, Twitter, OpenFire, Sparkweb, and a handful of IRC servers and channels. I'm currently looking at how to add OTR to jabber.

In any case, I'll push my notes to the external wiki shortly.

Update to OpenFire and JIRC

In the wiki, I've added an update and some additional notes to the OpenFire and JIRC page. In short: the xmpp.client.idle fix seems to work better in the most recent version of Openfire and I've added a description of what JIRC's output looks like when authentication to OpenFire is incorrect.

CDR notes update

Added/updated notes in the wiki for configuration and troubleshooting for Asterisk-STAT.

Vertex/Yaesu VX-150

About a month ago, I bought one of the older model Vertex/Yaesu VX-150 hand-held transceivers. I've used it for approximately three weeks, for about a half-hour per day on the charge that was on the battery when I bought it.

Yeah, I don't talk much but I'm still amazed by any device that lasts that long on a single charge. Only today did it start acting up because of low charge.

About the only thing that I want to change on the radio is the antenna. The stock rubber duck antenna requires that I jack the transmit power to high (~5W) so that I can reach the local repeater.

Openfire install II

One point that isn't highlighted enough in the install docs for Openfire. The first time that you attempt to login as the "admin" user, DON'T ENTER ANYTHING IN THE PASSWORD FIELD! If you do, the login attempt will likely fail and you'll need to manually reset the password. For those that use the external database, reseting the Openfire admin password is easy (scroll down to step 22). For those that use the embedded database, it looks like the easiest way out is to re-install.

Trixbox Xen?

Here's one: can anyone explain why the Trixbox distro has a Xen module? Has anything interesting been done with it? Or is it just an artifact of the underlying CentOS?

Update: Pulling RSS feeds through a translator

Back in 2006, I wrote a very short howto for pulling RSS feeds through translator services. It worked, mostly because the translator services were working on raw text. Shortly after that, the technique stopped working because the translator services became "smarter" and refused to work on specifically formatted input (i.e., RSS feeds stopped being translated).

I've updated the howto. You can now employ Yahoo Pipes to pipe just about any feed through Google Translate to your favorite RSS reader. I'm no expert at it and there's probably a better method for doing it, but it works. There's enough detail in the howto to build your own.