The Wall Street Journal is running an article entitled “Making IM Services Play Well Together” that features a review of Adium and other applications that allow you to use multiple IM accounts simultaneously.

Adium, www.adiumx.com, wins points for cuteness. The downloaded program is represented by a goofy, green duck, which plops itself in the Mac operating system dock and closes its eyes when not in use. When new messages are received via Adium, this duck flaps its wings until you open the message. The Adium user interface incorporates sleek visuals, such as status windows that gracefully float above user names whenever a cursor moves over these names.

On behalf of the Adium team, I’d like to welcome Ryan Govostes, our newest developer, to the project. No longer must I sleep with the light on, shivering in terror at PPC disassembly. Ryan has been contributing to the project for several years, contributing both code and expertise, and I’m personally thrilled to have him on board.

Mazel tov, Ryan 🙂

As of May 13th, 2008 AIHyperlinks, the framework responsible for Adium’s link detection, has been renamed to AutoHyperlinks and set free.

The framework has officially been relicensed under the modified BSD license, allowing Mac developers – large and small – to use our framework in their own projects, both open and closed source, for their hyperlink gathering and autolinkification needs.

So, I’d like to challenge you, Mac developers: changing all the http://’s from a string into links is the most obvious use for it, but I’m really curious what the Mac developer community at large can do with our little framework.

Interested? Read our AutoHyperlinks wiki page, grab the source, give back (if you’d like), and have at it!

Good news, Facebook fans! I’ve just finished adding Facebook Chat support to Adium for the next release 🙂

The deadline for Google Summer of Code proposals is today at 1700 Pacific (12:00 AM UTC 1 April, 2008). This is a great opportunity for students to get involved in open source through a paid summer internship sponsored by Google. Do you want to know more?

Adium is a finalist in the CNET 2008 Webware 100 Awards in the communications category. Voting doesn’t require any registration so just takes a moment; please consider casting a vote for your favorite duck-themed instant messaging client!

AOL announced Open AIM 2.0 today, and we’ve had a number of people ask what this means for Adium. I spoke with Michael Hall of instantmessagingplanet.com earlier today; AOL Opens AIM Some More has an explanation of Open AIM and some of my comments on the topic.

Chris Forsythe, aka The_Tick , is retiring from the position of Adium Project Manager after 3 years of hard work in that capacity and several years before that of deep involvement in the Adium community. As Project Manager, Chris helped ensure that the diverse assets of the community – web site, support network, forums, etc. – ran smoothly and aided in directing the project itself. On behalf of the team and all who have benefited from his dedicated efforts, I’d like to thank Chris heartily 🙂

Eric Richie , who wrote the in-application help for Adium and heads the Ticket Task Force, has volunteered to step up into the position and is the new Adium Project Manager. 🙂

I did in fact solve the problems we were having with Adium‘s install of buildbot. It turns out that because of some security features of Mac OS X, I needed to start the buildbot process from an actual Terminal window on that machine, not from ssh. You can read about all this (and much, much more!) in this technote.

A big thank you to everyone who helped out, especially Keith, Rob and Ben.

The following is cross posted from my personal blog, in case you’re subscribed to both and think you’re seeing duplicates, you’re not.

So a while ago I set up buildbot for Adium. Briefly, buildbot provides continuous integration (i.e., building the source tree after every checkin) and runs our unit tests automatically. Cool stuff, and hats off to the buildbot team. Things seemed to be running fine for a while, no problems. However, recently we’ve started to get some odd errors on the machine we use for running builds, a Mac Mini named smew¹.

Subversion began to fail looking up DNS requests. I could only reproduce the problem when buildbot was running svn. If I logged in, I could run the exact same commands myself. And even more curiously, telling buildbot to run nslookup svn.adiumx.com worked completely fine.

I “solved” this by having the buildbot master (on a Linux machine) doing the lookup and then telling the client to checkout svn://<ip here>. If the IP of the subversion server changes, we just need to do a clean build and it’ll pick up the change. It’s not a great solution, but definitely workable.

This worked either briefly or perhaps not at all, I don’t recall, because our automated tests began failing like so:

/Developer/Tools/RunUnitTests:298: note: Started tests for
architectures 'ppc i386'

/Developer/Tools/RunUnitTests:301: note: Running tests for
architecture 'ppc'

Wed Feb 13 02:07:40 smew.adiumx.com otest[41048] <Error>:
kCGErrorRangeCheck : 
On-demand launch of the Window Server is allowed for root user only.

Wed Feb 13 02:07:40 smew.adiumx.com otest[41048]
<Error>: kCGErrorRangeCheck :
 Set a breakpoint at CGErrorBreakpoint() to catch errors
as they are returned

2008-02-13 02:07 otest[41048] (CarbonCore.framework)
FSEventStreamStart: ERROR:
 FSEvents_connect() => (ipc/send) invalid destination port (268435459)
FAILED TO GET ASN FROM CORESERVICES so aborting.

/Developer/Tools/RunUnitTests: line 301: 41048 Abort trap              
arch -
arch "${TEST_ARCH}" "${TEST_RIG}" "${TEST_BUNDLE_PATH}"

/Developer/Tools/RunUnitTests:314: error: 
Test rig '/Developer/Tools/otest' exited abnormally
with code 134 (it may have crashed).

** BUILD FAILED **

This is particularly strange because again, I can run these tests manually and get proper results. Same user buildbot is running in (and that user is logged in to the machine and has a window server connection), same checkout, same everything, near as I can tell.

This may or may not be superstition and it is probably just a coincidence, but sometimes these tests do run, and it seems that when I am logged in to the machine via ssh things work OK. But after I log out, things go screwy again. It’s something screwy with that particular machine — I had the buildbot slave running on a Mac mini while I was at Mozilla and it worked just fine.

I’ve run a permissions repair. It fixed some things. Still no dice. Buildbot is using the python installed by Leopard. The machine is fully updated, none of that fixed the problems (not even the Leopard graphics update). This machine is located at a colo somewhere inaccessible (Mars?), so while doing an archive and install would normally be my next step, I don’t have easy access to the machine.

I’ve done everything I can think of that I can do easily. Help me blogosphere, you’re my only hope.