Another blog bites the dust

I’ve decided I wanted to find a reasonable blog editor to post from instead of using the web interface of Blogger (which is nice, but not THAT nice)

After long searches and going through a lot of blog editors (some even cost money) I’ve found this one which is called Zoundry which is even written in Python.

It has some neat features in it like:

• Tags support – including support for Technorati, Del.icio.us, Flicker, 43 things and more.
• Preview with your OWN template. It even downloaded my template and enabled me to view this post as it would appear in the blog.Anyhow, this is my first post out of it to test it out and see how it is and if its worth using it all the time.

My good friend Yaniv lately talked a lot about tags and other tagging related issues.Now this whole tagging thing is kinda going out of hand so I’ve decided to create a new game that will bring tagging to the real world.I’ve decided to call it GoTag.

Ingredients:

• One pack of 3M PostIts in the color of your choice (Yellow is recommened because you can see it very well on all clothes).
• One dark marker pen to write on the PostIts.

How to play?

I’ve just stumbled upon this article stating the the IFPI – the international equivalent of the RIAA – has just released a virus that will delete your P2P software.

Now I find this act to be criminal.

All the recent worm writers that were caught and legal action was taken against them. This virus is sponsored by an organization and as much as they’d like to fight P2P piracy, writing a virus and deleting software from my computer without my knowledge IS a CRIME!

As my good friend Dudu pointed out (and I forgot to tell you), Google Talk’s log abilities are very limited.

It only saves the last 20 lines of chat (and only if the window was closed properly, otherwise it will NOT save the log).

Since Google Talk currently lack any normal API (heck, its just one executable file ;-) ), I thought about writing a small up that would listen to file changes in the log directory, parse them and accumelate them in one file per converstaion with a person (similar to what the log is doing now).

After discovering the Google Talk Chat Log format and seeing that its not human readable, I’ve decided to write a log viewer so I can check out and read my logs whenever I want to.

You can download the Google Talk Chat Log Viewer v0.1 from here .

I’ve also written there the Google Talk Chat Log format if anyone else is interested.

Enjoy!

Google Talk stored all of your custom messages that you have entered in a file in your user profile directory.

The file is located at “%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Talk\status”

Inside you will find a file named in the format [userid]-history.txt.

So if your Gmail account is John.Dow@gmail.com the filename will be john.dow_gmail.com-history.txt (besides, there is usually only one file there anyway ;-) ).

The file format is very easy. It start with a first line which has the character “1” in it. I’m not sure what it stands for and what it do but you can disregard it.

If you every wondered how to disable Google Talk’s auto update feature, I found an easy way of doing this which, at least for now, seems to work.

NOTE:

Be sure to backup the registry entries before using the registry’s Export feature when standing on the Google Talk AutoUpdate key.

1. Close Google Talk
2. Open the registry (using regedit.exe)
3. Go to My Machine\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Talk\Autoupdate
4. Change the value of UpdateURL to something in valid (or empty)
5. Start Google Talk

That’s it.

I’ve just stumbled upon this, which seems to contain some very interesting speculations as to Google’s future plans.

They all strengthen my point about in my previous post that Gmail IDs are a Passport like system for authentication and they will be used throughout current and future services. They are already being used in most of Google’s personalization sites.

Another thing the link I started with talks about is the fact that Google Talk is also more about managing your contacts and you can see that the integration with Gmail and its Contacts into Google Talk also adds to the fact they it is heading to a more centralized authentication system.

It seems that there are more than a few people (well, at least 2) that have some other thoughts about Google.

I must admit that at first I was also inside the Google Talk frenzy, submersed in all the hype, but after reading Nuggest’s post and Drunken Batman’s post I started to ponder a bit about their thoughts and I must say that have some really good points.

Although Google Talk is still in v1.0 (or v0.1, depends on how you look at it) and it lacks a lot of the client features that its competitors have, we should also assume that their server software (even though based on the open XMPP standard that Jabber uses) is at v1.0 (or v0.1, as I said about the client).

I just installed Google Talk (talk.google.com). Its REALLY cool.

It’s a basic IM and its in Beta but the Voice has a really good quality.

I really liked the fact that they use an open standard, the Jabber/XMPP (www.xmpp.org) which is always good. This means that you can use any Jabber/XMPP supported client like iChat (for MacOS), GAIM (For Windows and Linux), etc.

Read their developer manifesto here, to see that they mean business and I do hope that they will use the built-in federation ability of the Jabber/XMPP protocol to federate messages to other IMs such as Yahoo, AIM/ICQ and MSN.