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!

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…

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

See you all on #empathy!

Contacts on the N900

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

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).

GList *list = e_vcard_get_attributes (evcard);

for (list = g_list_first (list);
     list != NULL;
     list = g_list_next (list))
{
         /* Do something */
}

for (list = g_list_first (list);
     list != NULL;
     list = g_list_next (list))
{
         /* Do something else */
         g_object_unref (list->data);
}

g_free (g_list_first (list));

“Surprisingly” it was not working, but at least it was not leaking memory as the return value of e_vcard_get_attributes is not supposed to be freed

How can you do this automatically?

This becomes particularly silly if you cannot be sure that the string you are going to parse is actually a full name, for instance don’t try to parse a chat nickname. It’s true that gmail/gtalk uses your full name by default, but this is only a default and it’s true only for gmail.

To cut a long story short, please please please don’t try to parse names. You can see by yourself how hard it is, even if I’m just considering western-style names.
If you still don’t trust me here’s a quote from e-name-western.c, i.e. the file that does name parsing in libebook :

* <Nat> Jamie, do you know anything about name parsing?
* <jwz> Are you going down that rat hole? Bring a flashlight.

On a side note when you are trying to understand why some code is broken you can find some funny commits, like the great EDS purge

Update: I found this “serious” bug in e_name_western_parse .

Speaking of cooking, in Italy it’s quite common to make your own limoncello or other similar liqueurs so I finally decided to try making a basil-based limoncello-like liqueur. This kind of liqueurs is made using some 95% (190 proof) alcohol to extract the flavour form the lemon/basil/whatever and then the result is diluted with water and sugar. In Italy bottles of grain alcohol are available in most grocery stores^[1], but here it seems impossible to find. I suspect that the only way to have access to it in the UK is to work in a lab where alcohol is used^[2].

[1] And nobody that I know of tried to just drink it or used it to make other drinks stronger, so I was quite surprised when I discovered that pure alcohol is used in the US (in the states where it’s legal) almost only to make drinks stronger.

[2] Somebody in Cambridge reading this that works in a place where 95% alcohol is used?

Clearly I need to cook a cake for this event .

At FOSDEM I willl give a talk on what I did and I will have with me a DR 1000S, so you can play with it (I suspect that most people will follow the talk only because of the nice toy )

An iRex Digital Reader 1000S