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| Friday, June 14, 2002 |
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Doesn't suck 
Dig it: the Munich airport has free wi-fi. Opened the laptop, saw there was a signal, from Air-LAN, clicked around a bit, and... voila! The Web was there. So was email. Of course, I've got about five minutes before I need to board the plane, but still. Makes me love Munich. Piers is sitting next to me here, getting out as well on his tiny Sony laptop running Red Hat 7.3. Having trouble SSH-ing out, though. The service might be blocking a port or something. Just allowing SMTP and HTTP, perhaps.
Morning quarterbacking
Michael Jardeen has more on Monday.
Blürd von der Tag
"Blurker": somebody who lurks on a blog but never writes. Just heard it from Peter St. Andre.
Jabbering, cont'd
Jeremie Miller (didn't know he had two blogs!) is behind the podium, giving the morning talk. My notes, live —
| | His talk is about the Jabber Community, which he founded. Context: Jabber is his baby. He wrote the original code, named the protocol and the project. He's its Linus Torvalds (and very modest about it).
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| | Apache 2.0 mod_jabber - you can run a jabber server inside an apache server, and administer it through Apache functions, logins, extensions, etc. It integrates jabber funct into the apache world
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| | UNIX - make it so every unix user has a jabber server
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| | Email/IMAP - experimental, you can take a small jabber server that points to an imap server, that uses imap for authentication. Users can download jabber clients to run alongside email clients. they can use the same ids and passwords
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| | Presence... plan to use it more generically and separate it from IM, use it as a service and access it from other environments
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| | Calendering... with xCal, to move toward what Exchange does today, use Jabber for notifications
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| | Apple's new iChat... In Jaguar release of OS X iChat will integrate AIM funcitonality, and will contain jabber funcitonality, not yet exposed to users. It will use the Jabber protocol when iChat is communicating with ohters in the local system. (The global server is AOLs, he told me last night.) iChat has Jabber protocol elements implemented inside of it as well, so perhaps they can turn on iChat as a Jabber client at some point. Jeremie is appealing to people who know people at Apple to open communications with Jabber.org folks. (Last night we talked about how this should be happening in much the same way as Apple is working with the Darwin/BSD community and other outside open source efforts (e.g. the gcc) — in a geek2geek way. Organic, among peers interested in seeing the common infrastructure developed and carried forward as better foundational stuff.
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| | Worldwidelexicon.org is another allied effort (its site, at the link, is a blog). It's a study-at-home, distributed affair that uses people as a distributed engine for translations. Get a thousand people doing translations, each of which might know local slang and arcane versions of words, collecting info and exposing for free their expertisxe to each other and to (I think I have this right) dictionary servers. The protocols used are such that WorldwideLexicon could use (Jabber) IM to build and take advantage of it. And it uses IM to build an index. The ultimate purpose: communicate with anybody in any language, doing much better translation than a standard dictionary alone could do. Missed some of that, but you can get more at the site.
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| | The Jabberzilla project builds Jabber functionality into Mozilla in a way that any Mozilla browser on any platform can use Jabber. Access to XSLT, SVG, MathML. (Think I got that right, or close.) The idea: you can build Jabber functionality into any app, and get it across multiple platforms for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is to strech all kinds of interop boundaries. Jabber for Mozilla, Mozilla for Jabber, and beyond.
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| | Open source... There is a need to make clear that Jabber.org is not exclusive to open source, nor should it be defined strictly as an open source community. It has its roots there, but it is "an open community" (Jeremie keep stressing), which means it is open to anybody who wants to contribute. There is not a need to be working on an open source product (other than Jabber itself). Anyone doing anything with Jabber is welcome. They only need to post to the mailing list and donate to the Jabber Software Foundation. It's about using and spreading jabber, and a way to notify others in the community about what you're doing. "We welcome anyone who wants to particiapte." Commercial users, developers and other companies are all invited, plus users.
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| | Jabber Software Foundation... On the agenda is a neeed to talk about collaboration, about pub/sub.
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| | Description of Jabber itself ... "a model of simplicity."
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| | Jeremie brings up a slide with a drawing: servers, IM networks, services in one circle. Another diagram has a server in one circle with arrows to client and service. "This is it," he says, pointing to the two diagrams and a list of three simple tags.
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| | "I'm not sure why this magic formula has done so much for so many people, but it turns out to be quite rich in the message, presence and IQ elements... It can do so many things for so many communities who want to communicate dynamically... It opens up all kinds of possibilities... Every point can be a service platform. Anything in the cloud can happen independently..."
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| | Jabber was not tied to any technique, any back end.
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| | "A vision came from claude a few months ago... had to do with the buddy list and the roster... We have to commmunicate with so many people in so many different ways... We need a simple list that says whether you"re available or not. That simple list is the main form of contact..."
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| | His point: the buddy list is the most potentiated concept. Now we need to have it available everywhere we need it.
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| | Tim Berners-Lee had a vision for the Web: (quote is TBL's) "An interactive world of shared information through which people can communicate with each other and machines." Also, "I had an dream (and still have a dream) tha the web could be less of a T channel and more of an interactive sea of shared knowledg. I imagine it immersing us in a wrarm, friendly environmebnt made of the things we and our friends have seen, hear, believe or have figured out." (Hope I got that right. Close enough, I think.)
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| | Across the top: five PCs, lableled
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| | "dumb," "pc," "mac," "x," and "next"
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| | Across the middle is an arrow, within which is this:
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| | Addressing scheme + common protocol + format negotiation
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| | Connected to the arrow are the 5 pcs, plus these items below:
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| | http server, ftp server, gopher server, nntp server (plus some other stuff I can't read... but you get the idea)
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| | Jeremie: "Jabber is closer to what Tim wanted originally than what the Web in some ways has become. We want to take Jabber to where Tim wanted the Web to go."
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| | [Note: I'm working on a full JabberConf report for Linux Journal. That should be up later today. Kinda depends on timing. Right now it's 11:04am here in Munich, and 2:04am in Seattle, where the LJ offices are. The conference will end at about 2pm here. I fly to London at 6pm.]
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Now Phil Hildebrand (works for Motorola) is up, talking about Wireless Village. Interesting project.
And now Peter St. Andre is up, talking about the Jabber Software Foundation and how to get involved: - join the standards discussion list
- submit a Jabber Enhancement Proposals
- become an individual member
- run for Jabber Council
- Run for the Board of Directors
- Become a Corporate sponsor
He just asked if anybody here had blogs (adding that he had already blogged the event himself). A few hands went up. Then I asked who was blogging this right now . Only my hand stayed up. Jeremie just came over (now we're on break) and said he'd be blogging it if he had wireless here. Interesting: he hacked his own very simple blog, and uses a Jabber client to post to the blog, which uses PHP. "Basically I just chat to it," he said.
Now break is over and Joe Hildebrand (I don't think he's related to Phil) is up. He's talking about future protocols and the scenarios that require them. Very interesting stuff I can't keep up with (and my battery is running down, dammit).
(Okay, plugged in now.) Dave (DizzyD) Smith is up, talking about current status of Jabber stuff. Not to be confused (as I have) with DJ Adams, who wrote the Programming Jabber book for O'Reilly. (Here's his blog.) DizzyD says...
| | People first start using Jabber for IM, then start working on apps... supply chain management, CRM... as an app platform as well. Integrate with Web services.
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| | ...It's no surpise to find that some vendors don't want to interoperate. You can guess who those are.
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| | You need to be able to build collaborative applications using business logic.
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Now a couple guys from Splendo are on stage. They've invented a technology that uses Jabber to push messages in iMode. They're sending stuff back and forth between a Jabber IM client (on a laptop) and a Blackberry. They'd do it with an iMode phone, but their phone doesn't have roaming here. They say DoCoMo says it can't be done, but it can.
Hanging later with Max Horn, who does JabberFox.
Unwired at sea
m-Travel.com: Luxury ship has world's largest wireless network.
Carrying off
It's just past seven in the morning here at the Forum Hotel in Munich — the second and last day of JabberConf. I'm sitting in the lobby taking advantage of wi-fi provided by the hotel. It's sold in 2-hour or 24-hour blocks for a whopping 9.5 or 29 Euros, respectively. (What's the HTML for that E-like Euro symbol, I wonder?) [Later...] Ah: €. Thanks go to Beat Bolli for this here.
Given the convenience, the price isn't bad. For technical reasons beyond andybody's control, JabberConf's wi-fi base station doesn't work, although they still provide a high-speed pipe and a hub, so all the geeks have been gathered around a table outside the conference rooms. But since I wanted to use the Net live in the rooms, I paid for the hotel's wireless access.
It's an interesting system. The hotel sells a plastic card with a user ID and a password hidden behind scratch-off paint like they put on lottery cards. The card has a URL. Punch the URL into your browser and a page comes up that says "Javascript is enabled!" before it redirects to a login page that mercifully consists of a login/password form and an enter button. Click and you're good for 2 or 24 hours, depending on which you bought. The desk people at the hotel don't need to know anything more than the time increments they sell, and the footprint of the signal ("It covers the lobby and the conference rooms, but not your room upstairs"). And it works. Very simple and straightforward. (If you can read the German, here's the company page.)
As with the cruise two weeks ago, having a wi-fi hot spot in a social space (the library on the boat, the lobby in the hotel) has social effects. Guests aren't in their rooms, jacked to the Net in private. They're working, corresponding and chewing fat, all at once. The social protocols are interesting, too. Sometimes people collaborate ("look up 'munich bierhaus' on Google and click on the third link..."). Sometimes they pound their keyboards in private. Others respect both the private and public behaviors.
While I would have liked ethernet in my room, I really didn't miss it. I also understand why more hotels would rather deploy wi-fi than in-room ethernet: it's cheaper. The contractor doesn't need to pull wire to every room.
Semi-related. I'm told that you can get onto the wi-fi system in Denver's airport for free right now if you guess the right (and fairly obvious) login/password. For a limited time only, no doubt.
I'm wondering what it will do to travelers' between-flight choices if the main areas of terminals are lit with wi-fi and the $300/year airline lounges are out of range and still offering only old-fashioned dial-up? In my experience, that is becoming a common situation.
discuss
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