Yoan Blanc’s weblog

Jabber is my favorite IM protocol for years and not only because of this Open Source license but for its open minded approach. You can choose which server will provide you your service. I could be your company, a server in your country or Google because GTalk is build on top of Jabber (they just added Jingle for the sound supports). (BTW I’m waiting for Telepathy for my (stable) GNU/Linux box.)

That matter isn’t about Jabber or not here, but about a tool that lots of people are intrigued about, Bots. I’m not talking about Spambot but a chatting bot. Mine is very easy and it does quite nothing. Like a hello world, it’s interesting because you can see what is the power underlying a concept or a technology.

First of all, you need a jabber account (not a Google one, see bellow). Now let’s start by importing everything that is required for this from the Twisted Words libraries.

from twisted.words.protocols.jabber import client, jid
from twisted.xish import domish, xmlstream
from twisted.internet import reactor

Now, create the client. JID stands for Jabber ID.

me = jid.JID("greutly@swissjabber.ch/TwistedWords")
factory = client.basicClientFactory(me, "password")

The client works with callbacks, it’s event driven here. The one that is required is relative to the authentication.

def authd(xmlstream):
  # need to send presence so clients know we're
  # actually online.
  presence = domish.Element(('jabber:client', 'presence'))
  presence.addElement('status').addContent('Online')
  
  xmlstream.send(presence)
  
  # add a callback for the messages
  xmlstream.addObserver('/message', gotMessage)

The callback called gotMessage will receive the incoming messages and display them directly.

def gotMessage(message):
  # sorry for the __str__(), makes unicode happy
  print u"from: %s" % message["from"]
  for e in message.elements():
    if e.name == "body":
      print unicode(e.__str__())
      break

Now set the authentication callback to the factory.

factory.addBootstrap(xmlstream.STREAM_AUTHD_EVENT, authd)

And go!

reactor.connectTCP("swissjabber.ch", 5222, factory)
reactor.run()

The previous example doesn’t work with GMail account because they require TLS (that isn’t support for my version of Twisted Words). It seems that in the trac their is a support for TLS but I didn’t search much more longer in this direction.

The little script that is above. There is another one that will answer you when you talked to him. It reverses the words in the sentence you gave it before answering you.

Have fun! Twist’n’shout!

While I’m playing with LinkedIn there are some questions that comes to me.

• How to play with all these relations?
• Is it hard to know at which level is this person from me?
• Or if he/she is in my network at any level?
• Is this kind of Semantic Web? Or be expressed this way? (obviously yes, be easily, I can’t tell)

I remembered the math lessons from two or three years ago, I love mathematics more than ever now. Hard to pratice during lunch time. Friendship is a graph, instead of RDF not directed. And friendship could represented as a Simple Graph. So I tried to do a graph Graphviz that is cool for displaying them and Ruby because I need to more (and more) about it and the way you can hack things with it.

For the math part, I started with the Adjacency Matrix that is a pretty simple 0 or 1 n✕n matrix.

Next step is to generate a .dot file to GraphViz. This is easy.

A rich information should be at which level from the given node are the others? What I need is a function that gives me the levels of the nodes from the current one. It require only a few minutes of braining, and more to code it (especially with my poor experience, but I’m working on it, with Ruby).

And the result could be, this nice picture. Use this script this way (remove the tube part to see the .dot file):

./graph.rb 26 .93 | dot -Tgif -o graph.gif

Parameters are 26 nodes and 93% chance of unknowing another node.

My conclusion is that even with only few connections by node, the depth of the friend’s friend is very low and that it’s hard to obtain deep levels. I think that people in a modest town can reach everybody in it with only 3 or 4 levels.

./graph.rb 26 .93 | dot -Tgif -o graph.gif

If you ever tried to use the Packer of Dean Edwards, you probably constating that your script don’t work anymore. It happens to me and I found what did I do wrong.

This cool tool that compress and obfuscate your Javascript code do, at first, an inlining operation. NB: I use the PHP5 script. If Javascript is very cool about syntax, it isn’t anymore when code is inlined. In the following example I will put the mandatory semicolons (;) for uncompressed script in bold. These semicolons are required in inlined code.

var a=0;
var b=2;

if(a > b) {
	var text = "a is bigger than b";
	console.warn(text)
}

for(var i=0; i<b;i++)
	console.log(i + "/" + b);

function C(value) {
	var c = value
}

C.prototype.compare = function(value) {
	if(this.c == value)
		return 0;
	else if(this.c > value)
		return 1;
	else
		return -1
};

Every ; can be removed if you don’t want to compress your JS file.

By the way an intersting project called Fork Javascript that aims to get the best of Prototype and YUI.

I managed to put some extra functionalities to the admin area of the Bikini Test. Now they can directly published their events to Upcoming.org (that belongs to Y!).

There is two (not sexy) screenshots of it, it’s a little bit of Ajax and some glue code.

• Listing the month entries
• Editing the entry

An sample code of how this works (I’ve wrote some classes in PHP4 for this purpose). You can read before the Token-based Authentication of the Upcoming API.

<?php # -*- coding: utf8 -*-
// http://upcoming.org/services/api/keygen.php
$api_key = '##########';
// http://upcoming.org/services/auth/?api_key=<API_KEY>
$frob = '###.....###';

include(dirname(__FILE__).'/upcoming.lib.php');
$upcoming =& new Upcoming($api_key, $frob);
$upcoming->authGetToken();
?>
<h1>Agenda</h1>
<dl>
<?php
// Bikini Test
$venue =& new Venue();
$venue->id = 37518;
// an adapted event.search
$events = $upcoming->eventSearchByVenue($venue);
foreach($events as $event) {
?>
  <dt>
    <a href="<?= $event->url ?>">
      <?= $event->name; ?>
    </a>
  </dt>
  <dd>
    <?= $event->description; ?>
  </dd>
<?php
}
?>
</dl>

This will show the events of the Bikini Test Venue. It’s really easy and powerful. The library isn’t complete enough to decently authorize me to publish it here and now. If you are interested by it, contact me.

The API was painful and sometimes buggy but I think that in a couple of month it gonna be strong enough to avoid the strange behaviours I’ve met. So, “Is Upcoming ready for you?” The answer is no if you have business in mind, not yet, but yes if it’s for the fun.

We are in 2007 and I wanna just do a little feedback about the full-of-things year 2006. Very personal maybe boring, just like this blog.

First of all, I get my Bachelor in Science of Computer Science (formerly Diplôme HES) at la HE-ARC of Le Locle (Switzerland). The last project I worked on was a neurosurgerical software for brain disease in wxPython/VTK (for the EPFL).

Then, in the end of february, I leaved La Chaux-de-Fonds for a five months social work at La Branche (near Lausanne). I worked with mentally disabled people during their day-job. A very growing experience. This work was required in a alternative to the obligatory swiss army that isn’t anymore compatible with my philosophy.

During this period I started this blog, and started to look for my first true job. Is this a pure hazard?

I moved to Zürich, Moûtier, Lausanne and Dublin to show my face. It’s pretty hard to have a person in front of that is searching what you are and for doing what you want to. Bullshit is not the way to find a job I think, but sometimes it seems that it can work.

In August a Monday, I posted a comment in a blog, his boss called me the same day and I got an interview the day after and a “temporary” job on Thursday. My actual job, sounds crazy or too easy but, here I am today.

I mention temporary because of another pending job offer that finally didn’t append. I had my driving license to finish and, maybe, living a first experience in a city not too far from where I come isn’t a bad idea. My first expectaction was to leave Switzerland, now it’s the second. I want to do this before getting too old and less flexible to can.

When Dublin collapsed, I definitively moved to Lausanne, sharing a flat with this old dude Batiste and a friend of him’s girlfriend.

I worked on various projects involving PHP/MySQL with lots of Ajax to start, the crappy ActionScript 2.0 afterwards and for the end of the Year some XHTML/CSS integration, design fix with some DHTML things (mainly unobtrusive) with jQuery.

Now at the beginning of this new year, I want to push my knowledge and my curiosity further and share them with people. The thing that makes me sad is that I didn’t meet, here in Lausanne, people that are open enough to that, an underground network or a secret society exists maybe.

I think that 2007 will be another year with lots of activities in my working life, personnal one and social one.