Jabber, anyone?

My preferred IM client, gaim, is having trouble connecting to Yahoo's and MSN's IM servers. I'm also annoyed with the general obnoxiousness of AOL (AIM & icq), Yahoo, and Microsoft over holding tightly to their proprietary protocols that all basically do the same thing and refuse to play nicely with each other. Because of this, I'm announcing now that I'm going to try to make Jabber my preferred protocol. It's open source and open standards based. It may not do voice or video chat, but that's not what I need.

The one remaining problem is that I don't know if any of my buddies on other protocols are on Jabber, too.

So, if you want to join my revolt, contact me on one of the unfriendly protocols or by email to get my jabber id then download a jabber client by following a link from one of the client lists at jabber.org.

One Unwired Day

It reeks of an Intel marketing campaign with a name like "One Unwired Day", but tomorrow, September 25, 2003, you can borrow some bandwidth from a local Starbucks or another participating wireless location without the usual fees.

I may not take part since I have high speed connection at my desk and wireless + broadband at home. Maybe I'll bring my laptop to work and find a nice quiet wifi location where I can work with fewer interruptions than I get in my office.

This also seems like an opportunity for devious minds to probe for weaknesses in these for-pay services. I'll be watching /. and other news sources for reports of such.

Google WML converter

For the past two months, I've been experimenting with web surfing on a low-bandwidth, small screen device with HTTP/HTML and WAP/WML support. HTML has problems with table formatting, images that are too large and awkward horizontal scrolling. WAP/WML is faster and cleaner, but good sites are hard to find.

Google to the rescue again. Google has a search which only returns WAP sites, but even better they have a service which searches their whole index but the resulting pages are filtered through a HTML to WML converter. Point your own WAP device to http://wap.google.com/wml (Note that this won't work in a standard browser, only on a WAP device like a cell phone-based browser).

Talk Like A Pirate Day - September 19

My parents always told me that one can learn a lot by reading the newspaper. Just yesterday, for example, I learned that September 19 is Talk Like A Pirate Day. I imagine you could even learn by reading those parts of the paper which aren't written by Dave Barry.