I love it when I'm debugging something, and I hit the "ah-hah!" moment. It's the time when you're staring at the code, and everything wrong with it becomes clear. If you're not a coder, it's hard to convey the feeling. I'm the kind of coder that lives for the "ah-hah!" moment. I guess I'm something of an "ah-hah!" junkie (not to be confused with an a-ha junkie, which is entirely unrelated).

Tonight's moment was when I figured out why Jabber/XMPP file transfers have been broken in Pidgin for a while. True, the lack of complete support for XEP-0065 has been the major culprit for send failures (when behind a firewall at least), but the file receiving has been broken due to a SOCKS5 bug I found. This should make a lot of people happy, which in turn makes me happy.

Tomorrow is my last day at work. After work I'm immediately heading south to find an apartment in Charleston. Hopefully, I can find a suitable place for future "ah-hah!" moments to occur.

I just read an interesting article over on WorseThanFailure.com. While I have found some of the agile methodologies to be useful, I agree with one of the main points of the article: coding is hard.

One of the really sad parts of leaving my current job is the talented group of people I work with. It is probably the single most talented group I've worked with in my (relatively) short career.

Where am I going with this? Pidgin 2.0.1 is in the process of releasing as I type this. It should hopefully be propagating to the mirrors by the time I wake up tomorrow. I often take for granted the talent pool I get to work with on this project. It's another bell-curve-busting group of people, and I wouldn't have anywhere near as much fun if it wasn't for them.

First, eat tasty leftovers. Then, sit down and fix a half-dozen Pidgin bugs. Next, take out the trash, and realize that the weather is absolutely perfect for a run (it helps if you've been meaning to go running, but have been a lazy bum). Grab some appropriate running clothing, a water bottle, and your keys. Proceed back outside, get halfway across the parking lot, and feel the rain on your head. ARGH!

I guess I'll go back to closing those Pidgin bugs.

I finally added a testing framework to Gaim, like I had been planning to do for some time. I decided to use Check as the framework. I started out adding some tests for the utility functions in util.[ch], and others have already started writing additional tests. My testing even revealed that gaim_base16_decode() has not worked in over 3 years. Next step: set CruiseControl{,.NET} back up, so these unit tests will automatically run whenever anyone changes anything.

I've been working a lot with XMPP at work. It provides a great communications framework for our applications. The more I work with it, the better I am able to understand some stuff, especially stuff I didn't really get when I initially worked on, and then re-wrote the Jabber/XMPP support in Gaim.

What does this mean for Gaim? Well, the more I understand some of the deeper details of the "problem areas" in Gaim's Jabber support, the better I'll be able to fix them. Near-term, I'm hoping to make file transfer much more robust, and add support for XEP-0065 proxy servers, so file transfers have half a chance of going through a firewall. Once football season ends, I'll have more weekend time to spend making it all happen. The future is looking bright.

Finally saw Snakes on a Plane, and it was everything I had hoped for and more. You need to get your m-----------g ass off the m-----------g couch and go see it. Because Sam Jackson said so.

I got a lot of cleanup work done on Gaim while I was on vacation. With summer and beautiful weather winding down, I'm going to make a concious effort to spend more time on Gaim.

Football season is about to start, and my season tickets just arrived. We've got a great parking lot for the tailgate this year, and our seats are pretty good.

I could have sworn that I had something more important to say, but I can't think of a damn thing. Oh well.

I bit the bullet, and dealt with a bunch of my assigned tracker items today. I'm down to only about 130 to my name. But hey, progress is progress. In working today, I realized how badly I need to set up a testing framework, especially so I can just send arbitrary XML to the jabber code, to make sure it behaves correctly.

I've been pretty busy at work lately. Finally got a linux build server up and running with mono. I'm pretty impressed with how little work it took to get stuff to compile. The only things that don't work are those that depend on unmanaged code (which we don't compile for linux), and stuff written in managed C++, which mono doesn't support. CruiseControl.Net is still a little rough around the edges under mono, mostly with filenames containing backslashes, and other assorted nonsense. I should see if I can get a patch together for them.

On the Win32 side of things, I've done a lot lately with NCover, and the latest version is pretty slick. The author was very responsive when I had problems, and after I finally got a test case together, he was able to track down my problems pretty quickly. I love it when stuff JustWorks(TM).

I haven't had much time to work on Gaim lately, although we released a second beta not to long ago, and we're counting down for a real release of 2.0.0. I've been sifting through patches in my queue at a snails pace, but I've got one half-done here on my desktop, and another half-done on my laptop. Hopefully I'll be able to get those comitted pretty soon. I am getting irritated by going back and forth between unit-tested code at work, and the craptacular mess that is Gaim at home. We've got 3 cruisecontrol builds running, and we don't have a single test that gets executed. I think my next project will probably be to get a preliminary testing framework set up. Once we actually have one, it should be easier to sell people on the whole unit testing thing. We need a glibUnit.