jid-to-email


During the Christmas holidays I managed to find some time to write a couple of small programs related to the address book on the N900; they are nothing too fancy (no UI, no proper packaging, not the best code quality, etc.) as I wrote them for my personal use, but I still think it could be useful to share them with other people.

The one I’m talking about today is a simple command-line utility that adds an email address to your contacts based on the Jabber ID (or on the ID of other protocols). This is very useful to me as in Collabora we all have a roster automatically filled with the other Collaborans, this way I can automatically have their email addresses in my address book.

This cannot be done automatically for all the contact as, usually, it’s not true that a Jabber ID is also a valid email address (for instance it’s not true for jabber.org users), but it’s true at least for the GMail and Collabora servers.

If you want to try jid-to-email get the already compiled arm executable or the source code. Remember to take a backup before trying it, I don’t want to be blamed if something goes horribly wrong ;).

The program accepts two arguments: the vcard field for the IM protocol and a regular expression. For instance, if you cd to the directory where the program is and do “./jid-to-email X-JABBER @collabora.co.uk”, an email address will be added to all the contacts that have a Jabber ID containing “@collabora.co.uk”. Similarly “./jid-to-email X-JABBER ‘@g(oogle)?mail\.com’” will add an email address to all the contacts with a Jabber ID containing “@gmail.com” or “@googlemail.com”. You could also try using “X-MSN” to do the same thing for contacts that use their GMail address as MSN ID.

Please, let me know if you know any other server where the Jabber ID is always a valid email address.

By the way, this week-end I’m going to Brussels for FOSDEM: hope to meet a lot of GNOME people there!

I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting

Some lovely people out there


Some lovely guy sent me this email:

From:    ****@gmx.de
Subject: Freedom!

Take your closed source crap out of this planet, nobody cares about it.

--
Freedom Lover
--
Jetzt kostenlos herunterladen: Internet Explorer 8 und Mozilla Firefox 3.5 -
sicherer, schneller und einfacher! http://portal.gmx.net/de/go/chbrowser

Note the irony of using an email service that adds to your email an advertisement for Internet Explorer…

Early Christmas


It looks like Santa Claus arrived early for the Collabora employees :D

The N900 pyramid
N900 pyramid, and sadly some of them didn’t arrive yet

New #empathy IRC channel


In the last months the traffic on the #telepathy IRC channel on Freenode has been constantly growing, reaching the point where communication among developers is difficult and, at the same time, some new Empathy users are scared and don’t talk on the channel. This is why we just created a new #empathy channel on GIMPNet (irc.gnome.org) for all the empathy users, while #telepathy will be used for development-related discussions.

See you all on #empathy!

Contacts on Maemo


After the Maemo Summit the details on the address book application and framework in Maemo 5 are finally completely public so I can openly talk about what I worked on during the past year and, even better, I actually have a smartphone that runs this software! (Thanks to Nokia that gave out 300 N900s, but I will talk about this in my next post)

Contacts on the N900
Contacts on the N900

Contact details
Contact details

As you can see from the screenshots, the Contacts application has everything you would expect from a normal phone address book but it also tightly integrates IM. Your local, Jabber/GTalk and Skype contacts will appear in the same address book and, if you have a friend on multiple IM protocols, you can easily merge all the contacts into a single entity.

My main task has been making the component responsible for the IM part of the address book work properly, this component is an evolution-data-server backend (recently released under LGPL) that acts as a bridge between the Telepathy IM framework and evolution-data-server. See the README file for more details.
Sadly the library on top of evolution-data-server that does the magic contact merging and contains the widgets used on Maemo is not open, but there is some hope for it.

Address book components
Address book components

At the Maemo Summit I also gave a talk on Telepathy and how it’s used on Maemo, both for messaging/VOIP and for the contacts integration. The slides are available in PDF or in OpenOffice.org format (but for some reason colours look wrong in some recent versions of OpenOffice).

Previous Articles

More GList anti-patterns


Parsing names


Vala, Clutter and limoncello


Time goes by


WebKit GTK on iRex Digital Readers


Another waste of time


SOCKS5 in telepathy-gabble


Back from foss.in


Foss.in


Maemo & Boston summits


Maemo Summit


Back from holidays


Video support in WebKit GTK


Automatic generation of .list files


Back from GUADEC[1]


Tabs in Empathy


Gnome 3.0 != Topaz


Istanbul, I’m arriving!


Music back on my hard disk


Icecream


Beta version of Flash 10


Plugin support for WebKit GTK / Qt


History meme


Blogs, politicians and stupidity


I want my numpad back!


Please take these things away


Notify channels plugin for xchat(-gnome)


xchat-gnome and notifications


What I see from my desk


New job


Thesis & Telekinesis


Banana republic


UI design suggestion


Server outages


Iterators and hash tables


Exam, thesis and job


New countries in the axis of evil


No N810 for me


N810 Maemo Device Program


I want it!


Halloween hackergotchis


The theme formerly known as Gummy


Torino, a pretty theme for LaTeX Beamer


Lasagna with Leeks and Sausage


Molten Chocolate Cake


Eggplant Parmesan


Empathy plugin for nautilus-sendto


GNOME Birthday


File transfer icon


Strawberries Tiramisù


File transfers and Empathy/2


Weapons of mass destruction


Internet access for everyone at Etap hotel


File transfers and Empathy


Telekinesis and source control


Telekinesis


Setup programs for Windows


Broken chassis


Photobooth-like effects with OpenGL shaders


s/Apache/lighttpd/


Summer of Code


Some notes on my SOC proposal


purge included among the official Mercurial extensions


Simple user-to-user file transfer without configuration in a LAN


GRegex in GLib


New mobile phone and Bluetooth


WinCalendarTime 1.0


GtkSourceView licensing


gnome-main-menu


GRegex


gnome-format


Hello Planet GNOME!


Vista miracles


Small things that matter / 2


Small things that matter


Arrays of strings and relocation


Internet Explorer on Linux


TarteTatin.it


DNS problems


GSpell


Blob Sallad


Spell checking in GNOME


Physics enabled white board


Christmas hackergotchis


Panel messed up


Productive weekend


microsoft.com.should.give.up.because.linuxisgod.com


“Java open source” spam


Is the random function of your iPod really random?


Triple boot on a MacBook


Homemade sushi


WordPress backup


Planet GNOME Italia


WinCalendarTime 0.2


Evolution on Windows


Mercurial News


Summer of Code and GtkSourceView


hg purge


Assholes


Welcome to my blog

meI'm a 26 years old Italian software engineer that lives in the rainy Cambridge (UK). Here I work for Collabora on open source projects like WebKit, GNOME and Telepathy.
I have a skeleton in the cupboard: Opera is my favourite web browser and I also use Skype.