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.

Those of you who use the DEVONthink Pro organizational software may be happy to know that the developer has released several scripts for importing chat logs from other applications.

Specifically, he has released an Adium importer, an iChat importer, and a Second Life importer on his blog. Now you can organize your transcripts from those applications as well as your other documents.

The Adium importer is made possible by our XML log format, which makes writing importers and converters easier by being an open format. This means that, if you’re a programmer, you can write an importer or converter too.

Hot on the duck feet of Adium 1.2 comes a new version just in time for the weekend!

Adium 1.2.1 fixes a number of bugs accidentally introduced in 1.2, significantly reduces Adium’s memory footprint (both by fixing a couple leaks and by optimizing memory usage), improves the new Applescript dictionary, and corrects a gaggle of other issues. Group chats will now automatically reconnect when your instant messaging account reconnects, too!

We’ve expanded the horizons for use: Adium 1.2.1 is the most accessible version yet, with major improvements to support for VoiceOver and other assistive devices, and this release also brings a new translation into Slovenian.

See the version history for all 44 noteworthy changes.

Please don’t forget to contribute however you can; we’re always looking for patch writers and new developers, in particular. Also, please take a look at our site host NetworkRedux and our download host CacheFly if you’re in need of network services.

Enjoy =)

Apple maintains a page in the Mac Pro section of its website titled Performance, comparing the time that the Mac Pro needs to complete various tasks to the time needed by previous Macs Pro and the G5.

Previously, this page used the time required to build Adium 0.89 using Xcode. As I’ve said privately before, this benchmark didn’t really show off the Mac Pro well, because Adium’s build process at that time was very linear—it did not take good advantage of multiple processors. This was one of a great many things we fixed for Adium 1.0.

For the release of their new Mac Pro, they’ve updated it to use the build time for Adium 1.2. Now, the numbers are not only more current, but better express the parallel power of the Mac Pro.

Thanks to Jesper for the heads-up.

The Adium team is proud to announce the availability of Adium 1.2. This is a major feature release with a ton of fantastic improvements as well as a a ridiculous number of bug fixes. We’ve discussed many (but not all) of the new features themselves previously on the blog, including the improved Adium menu item and account management features, various and sundry improvements to Jabber support (including SSL certification authentication, server-supplied action support, and discovery services browsing), fixed Bonjour local area network messaging with file transfers, better group chat (conferencing), a completely rewritten Applescript dictionary which should lead to all sorts of powerful new interactions with other programs, and detachable groups. (One ‘advertised’ feature which did not make it into Adium 1.2 was MSN personal messages; development efforts for these are still in progress by the libpurple team. A future version of Adium will have this enhancement once it’s ready.)

That’s not all! Massive improvements have been made to the localization of Adium; if your native language is Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), English (including Australian English), Finnish, French, French Canadian, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, or Turkish, you’ll find Adium 1.2 to be your most natural instant messaging experience ever. 188 tickets were closed by Adium 1.2; each ticket represents a feature request or bug, most filed by users. As always, see the version history for all the noteworthy changes.

A lot goes into every Adium release, from testing to coding to support. We’re a friendly and active development and user community, but we always want for more hands, eyes, and minds. That means you! Remember, Adium is free, open source software, coded entirely by volunteers. See Contributing to Adium for how you can submit patches and code, help hunt down bugs, and donate!

We greatly appreciate the donated resources of our excellent site and code host NetworkRedux (who most recently added donated rack space and connectivity for our Mac Mini build and testing machine, smew, to the array of services they provide us) and our download host CacheFly!

The beta of Adium 1.2 is available. We’ve gone through several beta iterations already, and release shouldn’t be too far off. Please report thoroughly any regressions you find in your testing. Enjoy!

To clarify what I predict will be a misperception: This new Gmail feature doesn’t let you talk to AIM contacts from GTalk.

What it does is allow you to sign into AIM from Gmail. In other words, Gmail is now an AIM client as well as a Google Talk client. But you can’t send messages to your AIM-using friends using only a GTalk account: You need an AIM account, and you need to log in with it (in Gmail or otherwise), and you can only send messages to your AIM contacts from your AIM account, not your GTalk account.

So it really doesn’t work much differently from what you already get in Adium. You add both accounts, and Adium (or Gmail) figures out which account to use on the contact you opened a chat with.

My point is that the only people this affects are those who send IMs from Gmail. For the rest of us, this doesn’t really change anything: there’s still no inter-service messaging between AIM and GTalk.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about this since Andreas’ blog post went up, so I think everyone deserves a bit of explanation of what the MeBeam video plugin is and isn’t.

The MeBeam plug-in is:

1. Pretty spiffy 🙂
2. Developed almost entirely by a third party
3. Primarily web-based

The MeBeam plug-in is not:

1. A product of the Adium Team (Andreas works on it, but not as part of Adium—he works on it separately from the Adium Project)
2. The long-awaited Adium video chat solution
3. Taking any development resources at all away from that solution (the plugin is extremely simple)
4. Included with Adium by default

During all our work on integrating audio and video into Adium, it seems that a company called MeBeam was way ahead of us. They implemented a cross-platform, protocol-agnostic videochat solution using Flash. The best of all: They allowed us to integrate with their service!