I’m working on putting together Node-to-Node Darknet chat for Freenet. I was originally working on it as a mainline Freenet feature, but then I realized that it was too large of a feature to be present outside of a plugin. The plugin interface seems, from what I’ve seen, disturbingly close to the internals of Freenet: much of the code I was writing when internal to Freenet is very easily translated to the plugin. I hope I’m either misjudging things or doing it wrong. For example, I need to have a listener for my chat messages, and to register it, I call the same method from the plugin as I would internally. To send a message, though I can no longer add code to DarknetPeerNode, I can still call the basic message-sending method. Perhaps these things aren’t likely to change, but I somehow expected a plugin interface based more on actions than the internal structure. I hope I can get it working anyway; this has been taking longer than I’d like. I’m trying to learn JQuery as well for a shiny interface.
I upgraded my graphics card driver (AMD Catalyst) in the hope that they’d fixed the bug introduced in 11.5 where the mouse cursor gets stuck and moves choppily in the lower right and upper left corners. They hadn’t, and in the process of installing the driver somehow my sound broke. It started working again this morning. It may have been that I re-added myself to pulse and pulse-access groups and needed to reboot for the changes to take effect, but if not I can’t think of why. EDIT: I think it’s working again now. The HDMI on my Radeon HD 5770 may be conflicting with the normal sound card now for some reason: it’s not listed in sound preferences and the sound is working; when it was the sound wasn’t. It’s worth noting that the “Use audio devices” privilege checkbox is apparently not supposed to be checked. This article is helpful as well. EDIT 2: This article ended up doing the trick to get surround sound output and front panel input working. What worked for me was appending options snd-hda-intel model=auto to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and running sudo alsa force-reload to apply the changes. This is running Ubuntu Natty 11.04.
I’m looking into self-hosted or open source alternatives to Dropbox. After looking at lipsync and sparkleshare, I tried dvcs-autosync as it seemed more lightweight and used XMPP (instead of IRC like sparkleshare) for communication. It didn’t seem to work – changes were committed one file at a time, which was annoying as it popped up a notification bubble for each one. Although one side would appear to log in to the XMPP server and send its status updates, the other side always ignored them. When using Jabber.org instead of a local server, it seemed like only one side could log on at a time. sparkleshare, as it uses git, is incapable of syncing git repos. I’m now trying lipsync, but it’s not working quite right yet. On the upside, it’s a small enough thing that it’s fairly easy to pick up.