Jabber

Calling all classicists!

There is now a Jabber multi-user chat in classical Latin! Visit classicallatin@conference.jaim.at to learn the language, or exercise your conversational Latin. Latin enthusiasts of all skill levels are welcome.

Not sure what Jabber MUC is or how to get there? Read on...

To get on Jabber IM (instant messenger) and MUC (multi-user chat), you need two things: a client program and a Jabber account.

This is the web page for the Classical Latin MUC (Multi-User Chat) at classicallatin@conference.jaim.at. Latin students of all skill levels are welcome.

Every Latin student should know about the Perseus Project Latin Lexicon, and the Notre Dame Latin dictionary and grammer aid.

While we don't have any formal classes planned for the chat room, many of us are studying from the following books:

Several weeks from now, I plan to move my personal web site and associated services to a new server. This means higher reliability for my users (especially jabber users), and some re-organization on my part, as I just realized exactly how many users I have accumulated over time. To help me get things in order before the move, I sent a short questionnaire out to the jabber users for whom I have email addresses. Unfortunately, I only have current contact information for about 1/4 of the binaryredneck.net jabber users.

If your jabber ID ends in @jabber.binaryredneck.net, please drop me an email (using the contact form if you don't have my email address) with answers to the following:

Apparently, this is old news to everyone but me: LiveJournal has launched LJtalk, their new Jabber instant messaging service.

I've been a bit nervous that Google's Gtalk might someday leverage their huge userbase to help them drive the XMPP standard, wresting control from the community at large. This move by LiveJournal indicates that the 'net may finally be moving toward real distributed instant messaging, and that I probably shouldn't worry so much.

When I read that the LiveJournal crew had written their own jabber framework, I was a little excited, until I got far enough to see that Djabberd is "implemented in Perl (which might dissuade you)". Might? Sane people do NOT write something like a jabber daemon in an interpreted language. It's just plain lazy. At least they're using the C libxml for xml processing. That'll save a good deal of overhead compared to going all Perl.