July 2008 Archives

This is serious people. We can talk all we want about our developing country, India. But someone needs to act to make that happen. And clearly, the one's with the power to do something are incompetent, immoral, corrupted criminals.

Do read this for further details: http://www.deeshaa.org/2008/07/19/data-on-criminals-in-the-indian-parliament/

Their mandate is to maintain a market for mortgages - buying loans from banks, repackaging them as bonds, and selling those securities to investors with a guarantee that they will be paid. - CNN

I am not eco wiz but this right here just doesn't sound right. This pretty much sums up how, why and now of the current housing market and greases up the wheels of the roller coaster ride to follow soon. hold on to your pants !!

A side note before we start, I think the best way to earn money and still have your software product open sourced is to have no documentation or very little documentation of how it works. That seems to be case with process one, the company behind ejabberd. To be fair, I am just being a bit harsh. If something is not documented in the official documentation, there is always forums and online chatrooms you can join in and if you are patient enough someone will help you. But I think after spending good enough time with ejabberd setup and writing a custom module for it, I will say the documentation is definetly scant. Also, I don't understand why for any question I have about some part of the ejabberd server, it gets answered by someone starting with "look at the source code.....". What if I don't know how to read Erlang? What if I am just plain dumb? Its not that these things are difficult to do but they do cause a lot of waste of developer's time and even worse cause frustation (coming from personal experience).

anyways, so this is how you setup mod_xmlrpc on ejabberd. First, this module does not come packaged with the ejabberd installation. So you need to download it and build it yourself (no big deal though). svn check out the community contributed modules as per the instructions here. Before you can build the module you will also need to download and build xmlrpc app for erlang which is patched to work with ejabberd (I dont know what that means). Also get xmerl app which you will already have if you have installed Erlang/OTP. The thing with xmerl app or any other app which comes packaged with OTP is that there is no other way to download the app other than installing the whole of the OTP system. You cannot just download xmerl app if you want to. Atleast, I could not find a way to do it. This also means that you have to very careful which version of OTP you download. Ejabberd installation includes Erlang runtime. Thus files packaged with the latest OTP compiled for the latest erl VM may not work with erl VM in ejabberd. For my setup, ejabberd 2.0 comes with Erlang shell 5.5.5 which means I had to install OTP R11B-5.

now that you have all the required files, start off.
- build mod_xmlrpc: run build.sh and you should have mod_xmlrpc.beam file in ebin directory.
- I generally deploy all the module beam files in <ejabberdhome>\lib\ejabberd-2.0.1\ebin.
- copy xmerl app folder from you OTP installation (erlx.x.x\lib\xmerl-x.x.x)to <ejabberdhome>\lib directory
- build xmlrpc: run build.sh and you should have a bunch of .beam files in ebin directory. Create directory for xmlrpc app in <ejabberdhome>\lib and copy the ebin directory to this folder.
- Finally, update ejabberd.cfg file to include the mod_xmlrpc entry.

That should do it for you. By default, the rpc service runs on 4560 port which can be changed if needed.

i have been thinking about this since last couple a days. actually i haven't. But I have seen so many blog post start this way and always thought it kinda makes you sound more genuine about the post and shows that you have put in serious time and effort, even though what is going to follow is a post of how twitter is next big thing or how some new service is the twitter killer (latest wanna be killer being http://identi.ca/).

anyhoo. so this is what happened the last weekend, my friends in san jose wanted me to join them for the weekend. there were two cars going back to san jose, so i had no reason to take my own. fair enough. But somewhere deep down I had a feeling this was not a good idea. I was feeling uncomfortable. After I got my car, I had never been to any place without my car. I always had my car. This was so huge for me that my friend suggested that such a "big event" in my life deserves a blog post. Why I am so attached to my car. Well for one, I really like my car, so lets get that out of the way. But more importantly, its that if I have my car with me, I feel like I am in control or to put it differently makes me less dependent on anybody else. Which is big for me. Its like one of those things you really need to have with you when you are out of your house. With these things with you, you know you will be able to handle worst of the days. Same is for my wallet and my phone. I need to have my wallet and I need to my phone. With these two with me I feel I can overcome any extraordinary situations that may arise in the day. I just feels like I am in control of what can happen to me (ya..right..). And so true, the whole of my weekend, I kept feeling nervous uneasiness. As if something is missing, as if I was not guarded, as if i was vulnerable to sudden driving related emergencies. May be its just me and may be not. I like to think that there are people out there equally eccentric as me on this. May be, just may be.