Friday, May 26, 2017

RSS Feeds for Wikipedia Current Events and NHL News

I subscribe to a fair amount of feeds for news, blogs, articles, etc. I’m currently subscribed to 122 feeds, some of which have tens of articles a day (news sites), some of which are dead. [1] Unfortunately there’s still a few sites that I was visiting manually each …

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Friday, August 28, 2015

Boston Python: Twisted async networking framework

Yesterday, Stephen DiCato and I gave a talk for Boston Python titled: Twisted async networking framework. It was an introduction to intermediate level talk about using the Twisted networking framework based on our experiences at Percipient Networks.

The talk, available on our GitHub (PDF) covered a few basic topics:

  1. What …
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Sunday, April 27, 2014

Extending JavaScript Maps (or other built-in objects)

Finally another technical post, this one is about my adventures in attempting to extend the built-in Map object in JavaScript to extend the functionality. As background, there are two reasons we’d want this:

  1. In the chat backend we currently use JavaScript objects ({}) as hashes/maps to keep track of …

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Sunday, January 15, 2012

Instantbird Contact List Hack #2

There was a request on the Instantbird Bugzilla to always show contacts in the contact list as the “big” contact (as shown when a contact is selected). Similarly to my last post, this can easily be done with userChrome.css. See the post if you don’t know what userChrome …

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Monday, October 31, 2011

Instantbird Contact List Hack

A friend of mine asked me if there was a way to have selected contacts in the contact list NOT expand to two lines (where the status goes onto the second line) in Instantbird.

There’s actually no option to do this in Instantbird, but with a little userChrome tweak …

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Saturday, September 3, 2011

Adding a protocol to Instantbird (Part 2)

I had previously talked about adding a protocol to Instantbird, that focused on adding SIPE (Microsoft Office Communicator support). Since then I’ve been slowly working on defeating SIPE. Fortunately I found a few flags that help us compile it easily in Instantbird: we can declare that we do not …

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Saturday, June 18, 2011

Adding a new protocol (SIPE/Office Communicator) to Instantbird (part 1)

Microsoft Office Communicator is an instant messaging client that integrates into the Exchange Messaging Server (the protocol behind it is an extended version of SIP/SIMPLE). Anyway, there’s a libpurple (i.e. the backend of Instantbird and Pidgin) protocol plug-in for OCS (Office Communicator Server) called SIPE. (It’s …

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Monday, May 16, 2011

Compiling Instantbird

In the past I’ve tried to compile a few different programs that use the Mozilla toolkit to various levels of success. I’ve tried to compile Thunderbird, Songbird and Instantbird at various points. I got Thunderbird to compile, but it only worked sporadically (although I think that was Firefox …

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Tuesday, March 8, 2011

The so-called IRC “specifications”

In a previous post I had briefly gone over the “history of IRC” as I know it. I’m going to expand on this a bit as I’ve come to understand it a bit more while reading through documentation. (Hopefully it won’t sound too much like a rant …

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Thursday, February 17, 2011

Status Update - February 17, 2011

Another month has gone by so it’s time for another status update. Unfortunately not as much got done this month as I was hoping, but here’s a quick update of what I’ve worked on:

  • Bug 690 - jsProtoHelper could help registering commands
  • Bug 661 - JavaScript accounts do not …
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