Ayttm 0.6.1 — The work starts now
Posted: Oct 30, 2009, 19:18Just did an ayttm release. This is to lay groundwork for xmpp rewrite, which Piotr will be doing after I lay down the framework. The idea is to make a clean and light xmpp framework and then have even lighter plugins on top of it for gtalk, jabber, etc. Usability and extensibility FTW!
Ayttm Workout proposal at FOSS.in/2009
Posted: Oct 21, 2009, 16:08I just submitted an ayttm workout proposal for FOSS.IN/2009. Hopefully it will get accepted this time and we get some real work done. I want to get a 0.6.1 and 0.6.2 out before the event begins so that there is a nice clean base for people to work on.
I hope the workout gets accepted.
I hope we get worthwhile contributions.
I hope they have the cold caffeine too this time :D
Free food ftw!
Moving Ayttm to git
Posted: Sep 19, 2009, 16:41I am importing the ayttm cvs repository to git as I write this. This was something I had thought of earlier, but never had any motivation to do so since things just worked without it anyway. It was Kushal who made the suggestion to me, saying that it would be easier for the Fedora guys to keep in sync with development upstream. I take it from this that the Fedora community will contribute some code to ayttm in the future, which I will be able to pull in easily in the future.
Ayttm progress
Posted: Aug 24, 2009, 17:38Right now, the cvs version of ayttm looks pretty good. We've been able to get in YMSG16 support, MSNP15 support and a lot of fixes in the GUI and jabber. I finally got rid of the custom dialogs code in ayttm and Piotr has done a lot of work with the state/status messages. The netv2 code also seems to be looking quite good since nothing seems to be breaking in it of late.
There are a few filler functions that remain to be implemented in MSN so that it does not crash. Also, both yahoo and msn need file transfer and invitations -- I am not done with that either. I have been threatening to do a release for some time now, so I might just act out that threat in the coming weeks. So these are busy days.
Ayttm updates
Posted: Jul 11, 2009, 17:34First goal of getting yahoo working on YMSG16 is done. Read more about it in the ayttm journal. Roadmap for yahoo support is now:
- Fix the little things
- File Transfer
That will come in later. Most likely once netv2 merges into trunk. Now I will be shifting focus to MSN and other tiny protocols (livejournal, smtp, etc.) on netv2.
Sweating it out on YMSG16
Posted: Jul 02, 2009, 19:22I finally finished writing a working implementation of the YMSG16 authentication as described in this article. The authentication seems to be working quite well, but nothing else does. The server still does not respond to the older binary type messages. So the next thing I tried was to wireshark the windows based yahoo messenger ( my employer provided the windows box for me :D ) and I found out two things:
- The Authentication probably is what is described in the carbonize site, but there looks to be a different way to get the initial challenge string
- All messages go to and from one server in the form of HTTP POST and responses
There some more cookies involved as well, which is what Adrian was probably talking about in the comment to my previous post. Thankfully, since ayttm is on YMSG12, we are still online unlike pidgin, so no need to rush in a fix for this just yet. That said, the popup says I have until August 15th till YMSG12 dies too. I need to see how pidgin has fixed this. Maybe the fix is much simpler than revamping everything to do what the windows YMSGR is doing.
Update: I was wrong. I sent the wrong message to the server after authentication — forgot to add the challenge digest, which is why it barfed on me. Work is on now for stuff after the auth :)
What do we need for YMSG15?
Posted: Jun 19, 2009, 00:44Ayttm needs to go on to YMSG15. So I decided to do a small test to see what could break if we just change the protocol version sent to Yahoo. So I advanced the protocol version from 0x00000c to 0x00000f in libyahoo2. Also, I enabled debugging in libyahoo2 so that it could dump packets that it did not recognize. Here's my brain dump of the little experiment:
- Some packet numbered as 0xef. Don't know what that is
- File transfer will change, as I had seen from the last time I had fixed file transfer for YMSG12
- Gennady Feldman had added some service codes into the libyahoo2 for YMSG13, which seem to be coming in due to the move to YMSG15. The 0xf0 and 0xf1 above are a result of that. Also, messages to rename groups and move contacts between groups seem to have changed
- I got a 0xf0 message, which seems to be a list of buddy statuses, including mine
- A 0xf1 message, which seems to be the complete list of buddies. So I don't really need to fetch them from cab.yahoo.com, do I?
- Another thing that seems changed but did not affect me this time around seems to be the login procedure. I'm planning to move to YMSG16 for that since I have more complete information on how it can be implemented.
- To get YMSG16, I need SSL. To get SSL, I need to update libyahoo2 to move to netv2. So obviously this needs to go into the netv2 branch
netv2 does not seem to be ready just yet, Philip had problems getting gmail to work with netv2. There's a bit of tightrope walking with multiple threads and SSL. Hopefully I can figure out what the deal is since almost everything is starting to use SSL. Does anyone want to get their hands dirty on netv2?
But couldn't I just open up libpurple and get that stuff in? Yes, but it won't be fun enough would it? :)
First commit from work...
Posted: Feb 14, 2009, 00:51Yes, I can now work on ayttm at my workplace as well. I joined Red Hat last month :D
I had to replace gtk_tool_item_set_tooltips() function in various places since it is broken in the latest libgtk. Anyways, it has been deprecated since some time now, so no harm in that. The only big effect is that I had to bump up required gtk version to 2.12.
Anyways, once I get my bearings right at work, I should be able to contribute more regularly :)
Also, we need to push ayttm into Fedora.
FOSS.in
Posted: Nov 28, 2008, 19:48A great event to go to if you want to know exactly how many and how much Indians are contributing to FOSS. Major contribution seems to be coming on the KDE and the Linux kernel front.
Workouts must have been great -- didn't get a chance (nor was I adequately prepared) to go to any of them since I was busy with my own little workout -- trying to get asynchronous connection going on ayttm. It's almost working now, except for SSL stuff. It has nothing to do with connection management really. It has something to do with threads, callbacks and the main loop. If you look into the implementation of eb_do_no_callback_dialog () and imagine it to be in a different thread than that in the main loop, you'll have an idea of what I'm talking about. I hope I'll have it fixed before I leave for Mumbai on Monday.
Oh, and met Philip for the first time in person. We had an ayttm BoF session today, in which I struggled with the SSL stuff and Philip and Pradeep tried to get ayttm to compile on Pradeep's laptop.
Exhausting week... with a hopeful end
Posted: Sep 11, 2008, 23:47It's been (and continues to be) an exhausting week at work. I've been away from home from 6:00 AM to around 11:00 PM everyday and been buried upto my my brow in production problems, UAT releases and the "Why the hell is this written like this". Yahoo, MSN File Transfer have taken a reluctant back seat.
Between all this I got a response (two actually) to my request to my employers to sponsor my trip to Bangalore for FOSS.in if I get a chance to talk on Ayttm. I had made the request two weeks ago and finally got an encouraging response. Turns out that we have an "Open Source Group" and their Head seemed to be all for it.
Now waiting for FOSS.in/2008 to open up registrations so that we can propose a Project Day for Ayttm.