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[Programming] XMPP and Office Guru (Part 2)

Since my last post, I had a really hard time making XMPP work using XMPP severs for Linux. Luckily, there was an easier way of doing things without the messy details of installing and hosting your own XMPP server. From this post, How to Write Your Own IM Bot in Less Than 5 Minutes (http://www.labnol.org/internet/tutorial-create-bot-for-gtalk-yahoo-messenger/4354/) I found out that there is a service called IMified which 'hosts' your bots and calls a specific page to do all the processing. As an overview, below is a simple diagram on how IMified works. So going back to our previous problem, how do we create a location monitoring application which accepts user input thru IM and then displays it to a screen? So with my IMified bot in place, what I did was to code a simple PHP page which accepts POST parameters from IMified and processes it accordingly. Below is the source code for the page which accepts the values sent from IMified <?PHP /* IMified Message Handler Allan

Posting Source Codes

I have a draft post to the part 2 of my previous post about creating a chatbot, it seems like it has been stuck in draft for quite some time since I was looking for a solution on how to post source code here in Blogger. After trying out some stuff and having failed attempts, I went out for a while and shelved the whole thing. <? PHP echo ("Hello World!"); ?> Credit goes out to  http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2006/03/20/posting-source-code-to-blogger/  which apparently, I've failed to see previously. After trying it out, I've seen a  more proper and elegant solution. By enabling the "Show HTML literally" and adding a <pre> </pre> tag on the HTML source of the post one could obtain the formatting above. Hopefully I could finalize my previous post about setting up a chatbot.

[Programming] XMPP and Office Guru (Part 1)

I heard an idea one day.. They wanted some kind of 'online board' where everyone is duly accounted for. May it be that someone is on a meeting, or went out for coffee or whatever. Another thing they wanted was they wanted to have an in house chat application. I squirmed at the thought of building one just for that sole purpose when there are already gajillions of chat programs out there, open source, free, robust and would most likely work great. I dont see the point in reinventing the wheel if there is already a Michelin tire available up for grabs. Not to mention that it would easily integrate with any existing system. To those who dont know, Google made a half baked embodiement of their intelligent search engine in a form of a chat bot.. Aka, Google Guru. Feel free to add him (or her) to your GChat (guru@googlelabs.com) and ask him (or her) simple things like "temperature manila" .. So why not create something like Google Guru, like Office Guru or something?

Moving to a New Linux Web Based Torrent Client

For years, I have been using TorrentFlux (url here) as my primary torrent client situated in my Ubuntu download server. But as time went on, the developers completely abandoned the development of TorrentFlux which led to several forks which I think is still insufficient for my needs. Main GUI of TorrentFlux Ive checked several options which runs on a GUI-less environment. Since my Ubuntu server is just running on command line to save precious memory, I needed something bare, simple and is packed with features. Installing uTorrent Server is pretty straight forward. Download. Uncompress. Run. This is better than the approach of TorrentFlux which you need to setup LAMP server and create a database. More often than not, it happens to me that some of the data in the DB gets corrupted. I normally just reinstall the whole thing again. Main GUI of uTorrent Server To further elaborate on the setup process, I've gotten an excerpt from this thread which, quite simply discusses ho

Ive Messed Up My Master Boot Record

I got too overly excited in refreshing my OS installation in my old Inspiron 640m that I just cleaned off the Linux partition through the Drive Management Snap-in of Microsoft while I was still booted in XP. I completely forgot that the GRUB was the bootloader managing my OS selection in the Master Boot Record of my drive. In plain English, I wanted to clear out my old Linux installation and merge the partition with the old XP partition when I run the Windows 7 install. It was a mistake to use the Drive Management Snap-in rather than having the Windows 7 installation take care of the partition clearing. This caused problems because the bootloader (GRUB) or the one which asks which OS are you going to boot is in the partition I wiped out. Therefore, I cannot go into the Linux partition (obviously, since it has already been wiped out) nor the Windows XP partition. There is a quick fix with this by using the XP install CD and fixing the MBR by going to the command prompt and typing fi