Live Free. Live Happy.

XEP-0136 is an XMPP protocol extension used for storing and accessing message archives. Daniel Kraic has written a Pidgin plugin for accessing these archived messages. Below are the brief instructions for installing this plugin in Debian and using it. Generic installation instructions can be found in INSTALL file.

Installation:

• Download the plugin (https://github.com/danielkraic/Pidgin-XEP-0136-plugin/tags) and extract it.
  

  # unzip danielkraic-Pidgin-XEP-0136-plugin-v0.6-0-g74aea04.zip
  # cd danielkraic-Pidgin-XEP-0136-plugin-b22950b
  

TekCharge MP1550 is an awesome mobile charger. I had purchased it from Amazon and got it shipped with one of my friends. Few things which I think are really cool about this charger are:

1. Charger supports 7 different connectors. Furthermore there is a USB port, which means that theoretically any portable device that could be charged via USB could be charged using this charger.

At last, I get my first smartphone - Motorola Fire XT530 which is based on Android. And this was a gift from a very close buddy of mine - Srikanth. He wanted to gift me something for my marriage, and I put it off till my second anniversary as I wanted his gift to be something very memorable. And this has proved to be a really wonderful gift. Let me get into the details of the phone now.

It may sometime happen that a key of our laptop breaks, or no longer works properly. Often the solution suggested for this is to have the entire laptop keyboard replaced. But this is not economical considering that laptop keyboards are pretty costly.

Vim 7.3 has one really useful built-in feature - Blowfish encryption. With Blowfish encryption, strong encryption of files is now possible using vim. Here is a short tutorial on how to build RPM packages for Vim 7.3 on 64-bit CentOS 5 and CentOS 6. I have built the packages as user 'root'. However, it is generally not recommended to build packages as 'root'. Instead, this should be done as a normal user. I have not tried this but if you are interested, you can look at the links in the References section.

1. Install rpmbuild and some other tools.
   

This is a review of my online shopping experience with Diamond Books Publication (http://www.diamondbook.in/). Without doubt, ordering through your online portal is one of the worst sales experience I have ever had.

It has been almost 9 months since I've posted my last post. Now, that's a very very very long time. The longest time I've inactive on my blog. But now, I'm back! And hopefully, will not repeat this :p. So, here is what has been keeping me busy of late.

Here is a list of some of SIP clients for Nokia S60. Kindly note that these are generic SIP clients and not bound to any SIP provider as such.

• Tivi - Tivi is perhaps my favourite softphone. It is available as a free download and I believe the authors intend to keep it this way. Moreover Tivi is perhaps the only softphone which can directly call an IP address without registering with a SIP provider (though I couldn't hear the opposite person when I tried this feature).