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Void.Bot Skype Chat Bot is a proof of concept chat bot for group chats in Skype. It's written in PHP5 connected to Skype4Com to Skype Beta 3 running on a headless server on Windows Server 2003. It's more or less stable now.

To use it, just add it to a Skype chat and type #help in the chat.

One of the bigger problems has been to keep it running. COM failures tend to crash it. And at random times it seems to just stop running. I've now got it running in a looping batch file so that if it falls over, it gets restarted.

The only other real issue with the setup is that Skype still wants the user interface on the client to recat to activity. The worst issue is requests to share details. I've dealt with this with a small Windows automation tool which watches for the request dialog and hits OK.

PHP under windows is probably not the best tool for the job. I've heard that the Bitchun folks have a native Ruby client which talks direct to the API and can be used with Skype under Windows, Mac and Linux. The Bitchun Whuffie client on Windows is written in Ruby. Even with Ruby runtime, SqlLite and the Skype i/f code it's still under 1.5 Mb. Nice.

In the last week, I've upgraded Firefox and IE. Firefox 1.5 to 2.0 went very smoothly. It took about 5 minutes to upgrade. I spent the rest of the evening tweaking it, but it basically just worked.

IE6 to IE7 took an hour including a restart of the machine. Why, Why is it such a bloated pile of ****? And why did it leave icons all over the place, grab default browser, install frontpage which then grabbed a whole load of file association defaults? That's all just rude!

But that's not the whole story. I need a copy of IE6 as well to check web pages so I went looking for standalone versions. Needless to say MS doesn't help here. The first call was Evolt. They've hacked, zipped copies that mostly work. Except that cookies didn't work at all. Next stop was Tredosoft, and the Multiie installer. It's basically the same as Evolt but with an old copy of wininet.dll in the same directory. So now I've got a working browser, except that every time a frame loads I get a popup dialog. Luckily I have a windows automation utility I've been using for years and that auto hits "OK" every time the dialog appears.

While doing all this, and trying to debug the cookie problem I went all round the new security settings in IE7. Jeez' there's a lot of them!

Frankly I can't stand the new IE7 UI. But thanks to the wonders of Firefox extensions, I can use the IE7 rendering engine in a Firefox tab. I've then got a cut down IE6 that works just well enough to check CSS layouts in IE6.

Now we get to the real reason for doing this. I've got some fake tabs in the Ecademy web pages that work fine in E6 and Firefox after I discovered a CSS hack to provide different parameters to the two browsers. Like this.

This line is for all non-mozilla browsers
padding: 5px 0px 3px 0px;

This line is for all Mozilla browsers only and overrides the previous line
padding /* */: 3px 0px 1px 0px ;

Except that IE7 executes the second line. But also still disagrees with Firefox about the box model and is a pixel off. Another couple of hours later and I've finally managed to find settings that work identically in IE7 and Firefox. But ferchrisake, why do I have to? CSS is a bloody standard that's well documented. Why can't IE7 and Firefox agree about font sizes and pixel positions in something as simple as height, border, padding and margin? If I spec Arial at 70% and both browsers are using the same Arial font file on my machine, why are the font renderings different sizes?

Developers extravaganza with 3.0 beta - Skype Developer Zone Blog

Trying to get my head round this. It feels to me like a Mobile-Telco business model. Make it really easy and frictionless to buy widgets, ringtones, games, wallpaper using Skype credit from a shop front embedded in the client. Instead of "TXT POLY3 to 810023" It's choose an entry and click on buy.

Now this is potentially great for Extra developers. They have a route to market, a shop front and somebody doing the money collection (for a price of course). My problem is that I'm their worst customer. I'm not going to spend money on ringtones and wallpaper, I don't play trivial little games, and I'm not about to buy a WeeMee. I can just about imagine buying a Premium edition of Skylook or Pamela if I have a real business need for some of their functionality. But mostly I'd use Extras because they're cool and there's source available so I can hack them into something a bit better.

So at the moment, I'm not convinced.

With Bush in retreat and Rumsfeld now gone, what does this mean for Blair?

Blair Out. Blair Out.

And can we then have the inquiry into Afghanistan, Iraq and 7-7 ?

Have Skype re-invented IRC?

Here's a group chat about Skype 3.

Apologies to those of you who have received large numbers of emails from Ecademy containing an "EAP Report".

This report went live at the weekend and should have sent one report each week. A glitch in the code meant that the servers resent a copy every half hour or so. This has now been stopped.

Unfortunately this coincided with a problem with the mail server which meant there was a large backlog of email waiting to go out which included these multiple copies. Consequently we didn't catch the problem quickly enough. Sorting out the mail server and clearing the backlog then released the waiting copies.

The mail server is now delivering mail correctly. There may still be some mail from the backlog going out where remote mail servers were temporarily unavailable.

We're working on finding out why multiple copies of the report were sent to avoid this happening again in the future.

Apologies again for the inconvenience. [from: JB Ecademy]

Cory nails it.

Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

This was in an article about a Disney Exec saying,

"We understand now that piracy is a business model," said Sweeney, twice voted Hollywood's most powerful woman by the Hollywood Reporter. "It exists to serve a need in the market for consumers who want TV content on demand. Pirates compete the same way we do - through quality, price and availability. We don't like the model but we realise it's competitive enough to make it a major competitor going forward."

So how do you compete with "Free"? The answer is by providing "Easy" or "More". Hence I believe there is a market for 10c music tracks and music DVDs where the DVD is packed with extras. But there is no market for low quality, DRM infested $1 tracks or $10 CDs.

Free Will: Just the mind's way of estimating what it thinks it did

Consciousness: At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously and we're not very good at it.

Consciousness costs. Compared to non-conscious processing, self-awareness is slow and expensive. So how does it make us more fit to survive?

Leaders: Interesting to note how often sociopaths show up in the world's top echelons. The ones who succeed have become adept at blending in. But once they get there, they no longer need to try since people aspire to emulate them, making them perfect actors who's surroundings blend into them. (Hollyweird, then he acted like he was president of the United States)

That last one is disturbing. Pack Leaders appear to be fundamentally sociopathic, selfish and self obsessed. Like teenage males they lack empathy so perhaps they are teenage males that never grew up. While their ethics coincide with the packs ethics they make the pack more fit to survive. But when the two ethical drives diverge, the pack should kick them out and if necessary kill them.

Re: [xml-dev] XML has arrived :

Brother: "There, I've done the school news web page and I used Web 2.0"

Sister: "But the screen is blank!"

Brother: "Well, duh! You have to type the news in before you can read it!"

Offline messages : As you'd expect, this enables you to send messages to Google Talk friends who are offline. The messages will be delivered to your friends the next time they sign in with Google Talk or a third-party client. And when they sign in to Gmail, offline messages will be displayed as unread messages in their inbox. In Gmail, offline messages can be searched and organized -- just like instant messages in your chat history.

The guys at GoogleTalk development just don't get it and this is another example. One of the best things about Skype and in the current MSN Messenger is that you can send a message when the other party is offline and it arrives *in their* IM client when they come online. Routing messages into Gmail is not the same. Especially when you no longer need a Gmail account to run Googletalk.

It turns out Google can accept OPML for the Coop Search. Go to the admin page and choose Advanced. What they don't do is collect it automatically. You have to upload it.

Dene Schonknecht, the company's (Microsoft) media and entertainment alliance manager the earliest date it will be in the UK is towards the end of 2007. However, it could easily be 2008... ...We haven't yet selected a music store provider to build Marketplace in the UK, which means we're way off launch

Bwaahahahaha.

But wait a minute. Isn't teh Zune supposed to work with teh Urge, now they've dumped PFS and WMA-DRM? So they've pissed off the few poor fools who tried to build a WMA based music download site and now they haven't got a replacement can't do it themselves and need to find "partners" to do it for them. Do I detect a bit of channel conflict here?

So then we have the continued lunacy that whoever wants to build a legal music download site needs to build a new one in each market. So this won't just be the UK, but each and every country outside the USA.

iPod Killer. Right.

UK Political Blog Feeds now has a Google Coop Search that searches all the blog sites in the system. What I don't have yet is a good way of keeping it up to date. Maybe there's an API for adding sites but I haven't found it yet.

Of course, what I should be able to do is to just to point them at an OPML file. But that would be much too easy and they have to re-invent the wheel. I have the same problem but more so with Google Base. That system actually accepts extended RSS for entries but you can't just say "Here's an RSS feed" and have them read it. You have to FTP the feed to them and include all previous entries in the feed. It's a bulk upload, not an incremental upload.

If anyone wants to help contribute, feel free to volunteer through the Coop Search Home Page.

And BTW. I've got yet another profile to fill out for the account that owns the Coop Search engine. And the form for uploading a photo is broken. It respondes with Bad Request Your client has issued a malformed or illegal request. with both IE6 and FF2

I could really use some technique for being a full peer in Skype so that file transfers were quick but without being a supernode. My PC is getting random slow downs and kicking it's fan into action and every time this happens, Skype is using 30%-50% CPU which suggests it's relaying something for somebody.

People tell me that going to tools, options, connection and turning off "use 80 and 443 for alternate connections" prevents you from beinga supernode but it definitely doesn't work.

And why are relayed file transfers so slow?

Locale is one of the neater mashups I've seen. It collects shopping, museums, cafes, around a postcode and generates a day's worth of activities. Guess it might encourage you to do things and g to places you wouldn't have otherwise thought of.

Google and the Gradient

So now you've got all the bright, smart young things who want to start companies starting them on your servers, with clear and unambiguous incentives: get traffic, get paid.

Woo. Great, great post. Especially when I've just written about Incubator 2.0.

Of course, it's not going to happen because Google doesn't listen to the outside world.

The Internet startup screen in the UK is clearly ramping up. And predictably, getting seed and angel capital in the UK is as hard as ever.

So maybe it's time for the re-emergence of the Internet Incubator. Let's call it Incubator 2.0.

GorillaPark, GlassHouse, AntFactory, where are you now?

So what would an Incubator 2.0 look like? Would it encourage everyone to work from home? Provide hosting, accountancy, graphic design, PR services?

ITV News - Hacker cracks iTunes code

Trying to get my head round this. I think it means.

1) A company could create a music store that sold AAC-Fairplay DRMed tunes which would then play in iTunes and on an iPod.

2) A company could create a music player that played AAC-Fairplay DRMed tunes bought from iTMS

And somewhere in there, a customer could take AAC-Fairplay DRMed tunes from anywhere, strip the DRM and play it on anything that supports AAC but that's not what DVD John is selling.

What's the deal for Apple? Well if any company actually does any of this they've lost their virtous circle lock in on the iPod and they have to compete purely on their ability to design and ship a quality product. Arguably option 1) doesn't actually affect them much and actually makes the iPod more attractive. Any competitor selling tracks will have to get music company approval although they may be able to undercut iTMS. But even if iTMS sales drops to zero, it doesn't make any money.

But option 2 would make it easier for someone like Creative to compete directly with the iPod with no downside. And I think Creative is just the company to do it given that they must be upset with Microsoft for making PFS obsolete. The iPod is where all the money is. So that's where the lawsuits will come.

So then we have Microsoft. Will they license the Zune DRM to Creative? Because then Creative can build a player that works with all major formats and all major DRMs. Something neither Apple or Microsoft are likely to be able to bring themselves to do.

And of course all DRM is evil. But DRM from a single supplier is even more evil.

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