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Monthly Archives: January 2009

Mobile Colloquy review – version 1.0

Mobile Colloquy, the mobile counterpart of the popular Mac OS X IRC client, has hit Apples AppStore.

Even though this is the first release in its current form (there once was a version for jailbroken iPhones) and is only at version 1.0 right now, it already has quite a huge featurelist and a very polished UI. It’s built using the same framework, called Chat Core, as the desktop version.

The mobile version is opensource too, but unlike the desktop version – which is free – it costs $1.99 (€1.59). The sourcecode is freely available from SVN though, so you may build your own version – provided you do have Apples iPhone SDK.

As already mentioned, the user-interface is really clean and intuitive for Mac-users – but users coming from other operating systems won’t have a problem with it either as it is kind of self-explanatory and everything does what you expect it to do.

Auto-connect on startup is there, auto-join channels is included – although that is currently lacking the ability to automatically join keyed / +k channels which you however can do manually. In the Advanced Settings screen you can configure stuff like SSL for connections, change the port you connect to and specify a password for Nickserv and the likes.

Once you’re done configuring your stuff you’re presented with a two-tabbed screen where you can see your current connections on one (“Connections”) and on the other tab (“Colloquies”) you do have your channels and private messages. This screen is sorted by networks with each networks open channels and private messages associated to it. Each of the channels and queries can have a small bubble next to it that displays the numbers of unread lines from the last time you looked into it and if somebody highlighted you it’ll display a red bubble next to the blue one – very neat and very clearly laid out.

One thing IRC nuts may hate to see is the timer in the Connection tab – you now easily can see how much time you are wasting on IRC – Advice: turn a blind eye.

In the Colloquies tab you can see the last few lines of every channel and PM so you can determine whats going on even when not paying attention to a particular channel. Speaking of highlights – by default it’ll highlight when somebody says your nick – but the list of things to highlight on is expandable. And to top it all off – when somebody highlights you, the phone vibrates – or not, when you disable it.

Choice on what to en- or disable seems to be a strength of Mobile Colloquy – there is a boatload of options to choose from and each one comes with a pretty sane default, not all bells and whistles are enabled by default which i think is a plus. Bells and whistles it does have quite a few, you even can pick one of various styles. Want your conversations to look like you know from the SMS app on the phone? No problem, just pick the according style! The downside of changing styles is that you have to close down Mobile Colloquy for that and go to the iPhones settings, change it, and start it again.

But not all is lost – literally – as it saves parts of the last chatter on the channels you visited and displays it once you get back into them – not quite a bouncer with log replay, but hey…

Aside from the “usual stuff” like color support and basic formatting like writing in bold and underlined it does have a few notable and distinctive features too. For one, it sports nick completion from the input box – you start to type and it matches your input against the nicklist; you then only have to tap the upcoming hint to have it “tab-completed” – very cute and useful. iPhone users with firmware 2.2 and up do get graphical emoticons too (not pictured here as i’m still on 2.1).

Revolutionary for IRC apps on the iPhone can the next feature be called: Typing in landscape mode! Yes, you read that right – tilt your device to the side and there you go. But this is not only for the chat screens, also the two-tabbed main screen works in landscape mode – nifty!

Also unique is the searchable nicklist you can reach by hitting the “people” icon in the upper right in channel view. From there you can do the expected things: /whois and query the selected person. Not so unique but useful nonetheless is the built-in browser you can use to surf to a link from within Mobile Colloquy – you can open that link in Mobile Safari from there then too (or open it with Mobile Safari by default if you set it like that) but that involves closing down the chat app as you already might have guessed.

To sum it all up, chatting with Mobile Colloquy is a great experience and not far from that offered by desktop software – it’s just that seamless and intuitive! The few quirks here and there are probably ironed out in the near future as the developer-team is pretty open to suggestions and with a 1.0.1 bugfix release just around the corner they’re already one step closer.

Thanks go to jane and kiji from the Mobile Colloquy team for providing me with a free copy of it to write this review – i guess i’ll keep using it if i am allowed ;)

Thanks go to avarus too as he helped me getting that image stuff right – finally…

Note: Just as i’ve hit the “Publish” button, the 1.0.1 update was available in the AppStore so grab it while it’s hot.

Happy 15th Birthday, freenode!

christel of the freenode network writes in a posting on the staffblog about the beginning of freenode, which started 15 years ago.

15 years ago, on January 29th 1994 Rob (lilo) Levin first joined the channel #linuxneo on the EFNet IRC network. This date has since been referred to as the conceptual moment, the foundation, the cornerstone which later led to the network you now know as freenode.

She continues to tell how freenode became a network of its own, which happened after the channel has been through several moves over various networks to finally become irc.linpeople.org in 1995 – and “a few name-changes later and we’re freenode.”

Freenode nowadays mostly consists of channels for the F/OSS community – “from the Wikimedia Foundation to various Linux distributions (Fedora, Gentoo, Redhat, Suse to name but a few) to the Free Software Foundation to .. the list goes on and on and on..“ and is currently peaking at “just over 52,000 daily users, spread across FOSS and other peer-directed communities.”

Closing the posting she writes:

So, to each and every one of you, to each and every project on the network, to Free and Open Source Software, to the exchange of ideas and information, to the memory of lilo — A very happy 15th birthday to freenode!

And to each and every user and to all the volunteers, past and present — thank you for making this possible!

Happy Birthday freenode from here too – may there be at least another 15 years to follow! :)

Polish man broadcasts suicide live on the internet

On sunday evening, a man from Zagorz / Poland broadcasted a livestream of his suicide after his birthday party.

The guy, who turned 27 the day before, was described as being depressed and acting strange. He told friends that he had a surprise prepared for his birthday party but wouldn’t tell what it was when asked.

According to reports he logged in to a chatroom on Interia.pl, a polish web-portal, started broadcasting the videostream and hanged himself in front of the camera. One chatter immediately alerted the police reporting that there is a user “hanging motionless and in unnatural position” in front of his cam.

As the police arrived on the scene they found the man’s corpse hanging from a pipe. At that time his parents, who live in the same house, were sleeping and completely unaware of what happened. The unnamed man’s motive is still unclear as he didn’t leave a suicide note.

A similar case happened November last year where a 19 year old guy streamed his death caused by an overdose of prescription drugs live on the video-site justin.tv.

Condolences go to his friends and family.

Unreal 3.2.8-rc2 has been released

A little less than 4 weeks after the -rc1 release, there now is a -rc2 release of UnrealIRCd 3.2.8 available where some of the still present bugs have been fixed.

Fixes in this release include a bug that prevented you from compiling the IRCd on Mac OS X , problems with OperOverride that prevented you from -q/-a’ing someone when you were halfop, an issue with SuSE Linux 10.3 on AMD64 arch where the IRCd core-dumped on start, prevention of throttling client connections and stalling the IRCd when there are big adjustments made to the systems time after starting the IRCd and, last but not least, the documentation has been updated to reflect the latest additions and changes.

The full announcement and changelog can be found here and downloads are available from here.

HydraIRC releases version 0.3.165 and opens access to its sourcecode

On monday HydraIRC, calling itself “the professional client”, posted an announcement of a new version that has been released back in December on its website.

The announcement mentions a good reason for the update – security issues that also have plagued other clients as well, again in the form of malicious irc:// URLs which can lead to a crash of the client. The changelog calls the vulnerability a “remote DoS exploit” that is present in the “parsing code for long irc:// urls” but only when “hydrairc’s url handler is enabled.”

The posting states that to make the client crash you’d have to visit a website that contains the malicious irc:// link – so that’s one more reason to not just open any link you see being posted on IRC.

The real news, however, are below:

Hydra, the author of HydraIRC, says that “contrary to popular belief HydraIRC is NOT dead” and that he “and many other users still use it on a daily basis”. He also decided to open up the SVN repositories to the general public so “willing developers can get the source code without having to register with me first”.

Talking about the availability of the sourcecode he states that he’d “love to see what you come up with” and that “if you need inspiration check out TODO.TXT or come and talk to me in #HydraIRC on Efnet or Freenode”.


 Closing the announcement he writes that the “HydraIRC source code is NOT GPL/BSD/OSI Approved and you MAY NOT use it for any purpose other than for helping to contribute to HydraIRC. Please read LICENSE.TXT for more information.”

The client can be downloaded from here.