jabber – Marco Barisione's blog

Recently Google updated their XMPP servers to use standard Jingle for audio and video calls; see the “Google: The Future is Jingle” post on xmpp.org for some more details.
This would be good news for us, except that, by doing so, they broke calls in telepathy-gabble (so in Empathy, the N900 and MeeGo) in multiple ways.

Luckily GTalk developers were really cooperative and they agreed on fixing their servers and Will and Olivier already fixed Gabble too. The new version of Gabble (0.12.2 for the stable branch and 0.13.1 for the development one) should make calls work again on the desktop, MeeGo and on Harmattan (i.e. the N9 and N950) too.
For the N900 we don’t have any way to release updates, but Google will push an update to their servers (in the next week or two hopefully) with a N900-specific workaround.

Sadly video calls on the N900 will keep not working; the version of gst-dsp on the N900 doesn’t properly handle changes in the parameters of the stream .

Update: just to be clear, this affects only calls from GTalk to gabble. Calls in the other direction still work and calls between two devices of Gabble work too.

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!