my plug in baby
So, this is only loosely my work. As in, I did some hardware for it 5 months ago, and then nothing else. It was finished today by the UCC President, Bernard Blackham, but he's not going to blog about it, so I will.

After a long time with the old finger interface to the doors being non-operational, Bernard and a team of elite UCC hackers finally finished the interface between the DECServer Tearles and I installed and Jabber. Thus we now have the incredibly cool state of the doors via your instant messaging client. Frenchie and I celebrated by updating the door page with photos I took, schematics and a screenshot, just to prove it works. Instructions for anyone interested are on that website, but currently you have to be in our freenets to get access to the Jabber server (that's fine for anyone on WAIX, Aarnet or Internet2).

I am really loving Imendio Gossip, which is the Jabber client I have chosen to do this. It has lots of features like auto-away detection that make it really sensible for presence detection. Additionally the Jabber zones allow me to be logged in on my laptop and on my desktop with ease.

While I was demoing the door presence in UniSFA today, Matthias showed me that new Nokia phones have a built in chat and presence client that runs over GPRS. I did a quick search and discovered one service provider, it seems the technology is based off HTTP and wbxml. This sounds like a feature we absolutely have to have, there would be nothing cooler then my phone vibrating to tell me that the UCC Door has been unlocked. In fact, you could do it for all sorts of service testing, no more SMSes! If anyone works for Nokia, or has knowledge of this presence server protocol, or an open source server, I would love to have a play with it. I notice there is also mJabber, a J2ME jabber client.

Rocking technology integration at its finest!