PogzLabs

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...

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? ...

If you're one of those people who'd prefer to install Ubuntu Server for your server needs but is pretty much stumped on all the command line witchcraft. Heres a quick tip on getting your fix on the GUI life. Login to your account and just type sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop It will check for the packages which needs to be installed and as you answer yes, it will download it from the net and you'd have to manually invoke to get to the desktop. startx