Mind Control

My echo bot has received a bit of attention since my last post.

Add echo@test.collabora.co.uk to your jabber/gtalk friends, and you can see what I mean.

Note that it currently doesn’t automatically restart itself when it goes down. This is so that I can try to debug crashes rather than leaving them unnoticed. If echo@test.collabora.co.uk seems unresponsive, try gabble.echo@test.collabora.co.uk for now, and send me an email. I will try to add a watchdog bot soon, so that we can have a more reliable service, but I’m dancing all this weekend.

Telepathic Reverberations

If you have ever had a call with someone where something wasn’t working, and you’ve wondered whether it was your computer or your contact’s that was broken, I have the answer for you. It takes the form of a user that you can add to your contact list, and call to test your setup. If your contact does the same, then it should be very simple to narrow down where the problem lies.

If you are using XMPP (or Google Talk or Jabber if you hate acronyms), then gabble.echo@test.collabora.co.uk is the user you want. You can add it to your contact list and it will add you back. You can send it a message and it will send it back to you. If you call it, it will send your audio/video straight back to you. It might be a good idea to put headphones in before you do this though, to avoid feedback loops.

The bot is written in Python, and source can be found at http://git.collabora.co.uk/?p=user/alsuren/telepathy-ashes.git. It uses telepathy-gabble to connect to the server and Farsight for the streaming. This means that it has all of the same capabilities and limitations as Empathy on Linux. This makes it good for testing interoperability. If you try it out and have problems, feel free to leave a comment here, or join us in #telepathy on freenode and I (alsuren) will be happy to help you out.

A few things to note if you are having problems:

Users of the Google Mail interface are currently limited to audio only, because Google only uses the h.264 video codec, which cannot legally be distributed with Empathy. If enough people report this problem to them, then maybe they will include Theora as a fallback. There are ways that I could work around this problem for the echo service, but then it wouldn’t be a very good tool for testing whether you’re capable of calling Empathy users .

If you are using Ubuntu Jaunty and pulseaudio, you may notice high CPU usage and a really long lag in your audio. This is a known issue and is fixed in the pulseaudio that ships with Karmic.

Watch this space for an MSN echo service (since telepathy-butterfly now supports voice/video for MSN). Also, if you are interested in writing multi-protocol chat bots, I’m planning to re-factor the code and distribute it as part of telepathy-python. If you want a say in the new API, speak now.

Food for food.

I have been told that I should blog more often, and my software based blog posts will no longer be being shared on facebook, so something a little lighter might be more appropriate.

Those of you who know me well should be aware that I do like my food. Doesn’t always have to be expensive or the height of fashionable cuisine, as long as it’s interesting/satisfying.

A few meals that stand out recently:

Cream tea at Bea’s with Holly and her friend from home. If you’re looking for excess, then this is the place to go. They got pots of tea (plus extra hot water on request) a cupcake each, and a 3-layer platter of cakes between them for £8/person. I filched quite a lot, but most of it went in a doggy-bag.

I’ve been talking about Pizzaria Bel-Sit for a while now, but I’d not been there in years. It’s pretty much the best place to go for birthday parties. Back when I was little, I went there on my birthday and they gave me one of the staff-tshirts that that was too small for any member of staff they were planning on employing any time soon. Holly’s birthday presented the perfect opportunity to go there again. We had crispy-garlic-bread, which is wicked-cool (contrary to the comment of “Don’t order the garlic bread, it’s really nasty.” from the next table). There was a little girl in the queue in front of us whose parents had brought out for a birthday meal. Holly almost advertised that it was her birthday too, but she seemed a bit timid, so we hid the fact. Dessert took the form of baked alaska. I’d assumed that this would involve vanilla ice cream wrapped in something baked. How wrong I was. You don’t need to be honked at, and sung happy birthday to be impressed by the deserts at this place. A homemade mixture of rich ice cream flavours, sat on a slice od sponge and topped with flamed meringue.

At Edinburgh Lindy Exchange, notable food included Chocolate Soup, The Mosque Kitchen, and assorted cake provided by the locals. The Mosque Kitchen does simple curries and rice, served in paper bowls and eaten with plastic spoons while sitting at plastic garden tables. We need more places like this: good food that speaks for itself. Chocolate Soup does hot chocolate made with melted chocolate and semi-skimmed milk to make it taste richly of chocolate (contrast with the powder and cream approach of many places, which makes it just taste like fat). They also happen to make pretty nice soup (far nicer than that provided by EAT. on Monday in cambs.)