Jabber server

Technology,

Yesterday I had another one of those thougth’s of “if you build it they will come”. I will more than likely be disapointed but that doesn’t lessen the fun of trying. I’ve been wanting to setup a Jabber server for some time now but never really had the right motivation. The last few weeks have been busy consulting with Developers in the office on a new product and email as the colaboration tool is comical, to put it mildly.

I have RedHat running on an old NCR S26 in the office which is where I setup a Plone site some time ago. It’s had WordPress, Bugzilla, Forrest, and PHPNuke running on it at various times so it was a pefect canidate.

Yesterday I had another one of those thought’s of “if you build it they will come”. I will more than likely be disappointed but that doesn’t lessen the fun of trying. I’ve been wanting to setup a Jabber server for some time now but never really had the right motivation. The last few weeks have been busy consulting with Developers in the office on a new product and email as the collaboration tool is comical, to put it mildly.

I have RedHat running on an old NCR S26 in the office which is where I setup a Plone site some time ago. It’s had WordPress, Bugzilla, Forrest, and PHPNuke running on it at various times so it was a perfect candidate.

When searching for a Jabber server I had no idea what to look for but a few moments on Jabber’s server page and I found WildFire. If you take out the download time 15 minutes later I was up and running, logged in and on the admin section doing setup. After that I grabbed Gaim for Windows and was ready to go.

Now for the reality check, can I get anyone in the office to use it. Some already use MSN Messenger and IT is hands off when it comes to many of these kinds of suggestions, so we will see. I put a few feelers out today, but I won’t hold my breath. If all else fails I can put it on my test server and see if the family wants to use it. In general for a small or medium sized company that has a need for this type of communication I don’t see how you could go wrong with a setup like this.

Checking out themes

Personal,

I’ve been playing around with WordPress Themes a bit lately and have found a few I seem to like. The challenge being what can I tweak and what’s the result. Some of my recent downloads are:

I keep going back to my original modification of The Glass People. It’s clean, simple and I can follow the CSS and PHP. Now if I could only come up with one from scratch, something to add to the list I guess.

People dumping animals

Personal

Lost Dog

Can’t believe what I just saw about 45 minutes ago. A van stops at the end our our cludesack pauses for 5 – 10 seconds and then drives away. When I looked back a dog was standing in the street… I don’t get people sometimes.

A very fun loving puppy which looks to be a male rotwiler. Animal control is closed today, how ironic, so we’ll have to take him tomorrow. That is if he comes back. While I was typing this Rosce jumped the fence and the little one got out with him. Roscoe came back but the other one hasn’t yet. Hopefully their are some good hearted neighbors out there to at least get him to animal control. He may not have a great chance there but at least he’s out of the elements and would have an opportunity to get adopted. This is the second time we’ve had to deal with this type of thing. I guess being 5 minutes from animal control people might go there find it closed and then think, I’ll just find a nice spot close by someone will take care of it….. crazy.We’ll keep an eye out.

Unexpected outage

Personal

This morning when checking email I got a unknown host error, that was rather unexpected. After a few more checks it looked like a problem. When logging a ticket with 8-95.com, my host, it was learned the data center which physically houses the server the domain is on had a fiber line cut. Not only did they have problems with their primary circuit but their redundancy failed as well, not good. I’ve been following the outage on Webhostingtalk and I should consider myself lucky my site is not business related.

Since around 10:40 this morning that facility has been down but as of 6:15 looks like we’re back up. According to the thread on Webhostingtalk the carrier has routed around the fiber cut.