Matben's blog

It wasn't until very recently when I looked at some screen shots of Coccinella from other people I realized that contacts must be organized into groups for the roster to be manageable, and that the current method setting the group element for each contact was inadequate.

Since the treectrl widget I use for the roster actually supports DnD actions internally, the task was pretty straightforward. Treectrl is somewhat of an "odd bird" in the nest of Tcl by its more complex programming interface, but it was possible to create an add-on package that made the process extremely simple.

The situation is very similar to your usual desktop experience. Just select the contacts and drag them to an existing group, or outside any group to remove the group tag. This makes it simpler to organize any roster.

I also took the opportunity to make online contacts drag targets of desktop files. In other words, just drag a file from your desktop to an online contact to initiate file transfer.

Entity Capabilities is a method to reduce traffic by adding a compressed variant of disco info results in presence elements. Recently the XEP-0115 got an update which unfortunately breaks backwards compatibility.

Tcl/Tk is "known" for its ugliness to many developers but to them I can only say: you are living in the past. The tile theme engine is certainly not a one trick pony, but has a lot of functionality to offer that is not immediately obvious.

Many odd things are going on with Google's gTalk server at gmail.com. One odd thing is that I get presence stanzas pushed to me by the server with my own full JID as the from attribute, at regular (?) times.

Another issue is that I am not allowed to send normal messages to myself, at least if I specify my bare JID as the to attribute according to the XMPP standards. However, if I set my full JID as the address, it gets delivered OK.

Now and then there have been a lot of discussions about the JID Escaping XEP and I have contributed myself since I found it problematic that a user may enter a JID where its parts cannot be uniquely identified, and therefore is invalid from a users perspective.