Blog
Converse 8 has been released
September 13, 2021I’m happy to announce that, after almost a year of development, the latest major version of Converse has been released. Converse is an XMPP…
Mergebounce: Increasing performance by batching IndexedDB writes
May 05, 2021Converse is a browser-based XMPP chat client that I’ve been working on. It stores lots of user-data in the browser, so much data, that users…
Bitcoin as commons
February 04, 2021I recently saw an interesting interview with former Canadian prime minister Stephan Harper, where the topic of Bitcoin briefly came up, and…
Report on the Dusseldorf XMPP sprint
November 29, 2018Recently we held another XMPP sprint, this time in Dusseldorf at the Chaosdorf clubhouse.
Converse 4 released
September 21, 2018After more than 7 months of active development, Converse 4 has finally been released. Converse is an open source XMPP-based chat client…
Disabling Disqus comments on my blog
June 01, 2018I’ve decided to disable Disqus comments on this website. I was quite shocked recently when I saw tacky ads displayed in my blog. I’ve been…
2018 Gulaschprogrammiernacht and organizing sprints for XMPP
May 31, 2018Recently I attended the Gulaschprogrammiernacht for the first time. It’s a hacker/maker event in the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (Centre…
Slack's bait and switch
March 12, 2018Slack has finally decided to close down their IRC and XMPP gateways. True to form, you can only read their announcement if you already have…
A badge for linking to your XMPP chat
February 19, 2018You’ve probably noticed the coloured badges at the top of project READMEs on Github and Gitlab. These badges indicate various metrics about…
The 2018 XSF Summit
February 03, 2018This year I again attended the XMPP Software Foundation’s summit in Brussels. The summit spans two days and is held at Cisco’s offices. It’s…
Converse 3.3 has been released
January 18, 2018Last night I released version 3.3.0 of Converse.js, and as often happens with big releases, I made a quick bugfix release (3.3.1) today. The…
Using a virtual DOM with Backbone views
January 16, 2018Backbone.js, first released in 2010, provided one-way event binding with unidirectional data-flow and therefore a means to do reactive…
Custom SASL auth mechanisms in Strophe.js
November 05, 2016If you’ve decided to read this fairly technical blogpost, then you probably have at least a rough idea what SASL is about and why one would…
Strophe.js and Converse now support passwordless login with client certificates
September 15, 2016Did you know that x509 certificates, the certificates that webservers use to prove their identity during the establishment of an HTTPS…
Open Source software and the expection of free labor
November 29, 2015Over the last few years of starting and then maintaining an open source project that has received a decent amount of attention, converse.js…
Converting Youtube videos into mp3
November 29, 2015If you’re using Linux or a Mac, then there are two neat commandline tools which you can use to download and convert Youtube videos into mp…
A common grammatical mistake that programmers make
February 06, 2015I recently read a fascinating profile about a guy who made about 50 000 edits to Wikipedia to correct a relatively obscure grammatical…
Sprint Report: Merging Mockup and Patternslib
January 25, 2015This is a report on what I did at the Plone. Alpine City Sprint organized by Jens Klein and Christina Baumgartner in Innsbruck between 2…
The Solution to Jaron Lanier's Siren Servers
January 06, 2015In his book [Jaron Lanier](https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Jaron_Lanier) claims that the information on the web is undervalued and…
Book review: Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance
January 03, 2015This book, a best-seller written in 1974, is regarded as a classic and one of the most important and influential books of the last century…
Antifragile Software Ecosystems
January 14, 2014I recently finished reading the book Antifragile, by Nassim N. Taleb, in which he discusses the idea of antifragility, the property that…
Converse.js 0.7 released: Now supports Off-the-record encryption
November 10, 2013I’m happy to announce that the 0.7 release of Converse.js now supports Off-the-record (OTR) encrypted messaging. The OTR protocol not only…
Converse.js: XMPP instant messaging with Javascript
March 02, 2013It is now possible to use converse.js, the Javascript from collective.xmpp.chat, in a standalone way, to communicate with any public Jabber…
Report on the Beer and Wine Sprint in Cape Town
January 29, 2013The Beer and Wine sprint wrapped up on Sunday and it’s now a good time to report on what was South Africa’s first ever core Plone sprint…
Slides and Video for my talk on XMPP+Plone at Plone Conf 2012
November 02, 2012The video of the talk I gave at in Arnhem at the 2012 Plone Conf has been uploaded to Youtube. Check it out if you are interested in…
Collaborative editing of HTML with TinyMCE not going to happen soon
October 22, 2012TL:DR: Collaborative editing doesn’t work well with XML/HTML. Right now, the solution seems to be to use Markdown instead. During my talk on…
Instant Messaging for Plone with javascript and XMPP
July 30, 2012Late last year Yiorgis Gozadinos who at the time was still working for Jarn, released a video showing his work in integrating XMPP (eXtended…
Plone and Dexterity: Enable behaviors per content type instance
January 03, 2012plone.behaviors are great, but because they are stored in the FTI, they are enabled for all instances of a content type. This blogpost will…
The difference between BrowserSkins and BrowserLayers
July 08, 2011In this blogpost I’d like to shed some light on two concepts that sound similar and can be quite ambiguous and confusing when first…
Schema-extending Dexterity content types with five.grok and plone.behavior
June 13, 2011This is a quick blog post about using plone.behavior to change the schema of Plone’s Dexterity content types. Hopefully it’ll help people…
New spelling and grammar checker for TinyMCE
March 25, 2011The spellchecker “After the deadline” is now available as an add-on for TinyMCE in Plone. It’s multilingual, open-source, platform agnostic…
Plone 4 compatible release of Quills
March 10, 2011Since I’ve started this site, I’ve been using Quills for blogging functionality in Plone. So far, it’s been perfectly fine for my relatively…
New beta of Babble Client (and related packages) released
January 19, 2011After spending a few months acclimatising to a new life and continent, I’m happy to be productive again. I’ve released a new beta version of…
South American travel diary, Part 4. September 2010
October 11, 20103 September, Starting our hike to Choquequirao Choquequirao is a lesser known ruined Inca city located on the Salkantay mountains. It can…
South American travel diary, Part 3. Aug 2010
August 08, 2010In August, we continued traveling through Bolivia and onwards to Peru. Along the way we saw dinosaur tracks, a military parade celebrating…
South American travel diary, Part 2. July 2010
August 07, 2010We continue on our travels through South America, including visting the Pantanal in Brazil, Iguacu falls in Argentina, Ciudad del Este in…
South American travel diary, Part 1. June 2010
July 06, 2010This is a roundup of the first month of my shared travels through Brazil and South America, in the form of a journal or diary. I tried to…
Backpacking through South America
May 26, 2010On Sunday 30th May I’ll be flying to Sao Paulo, Brazil for a 4 month adventure backpacking through South America. This trip been more than…
Babble: Instant messaging for Plone
April 29, 2010babble.client is new a chat client for Plone, similar in style to Google Chat and Facebook Chat. I’ve been having a lot of fun at Syslab…
Using extract_messages in your Pylons/Python egg with a ./src directory layout
March 24, 2010If you want to have your egg’s package contents inside a ‘src’ folder, you’ll need to tweak the configuration files a bit. Here’s what I’ve…
Why you should open source your code
March 18, 2010This blog post is based upon my experience in developing add-ons for the Plone open source content management system. It’s therefore mostly…
Archetypes: Schema extending an object only inside a specific folder
January 26, 2010It’s possible to register schema-extenders (and modifiers) for only certain subsections (folders) of your Plone site. It’s relatively simple…
Using the Gmail SMTP server to send emails from Plone
January 04, 2010Need to test emails on a local test instance, or just too lazy to set up your own mail server? Just use Google’s smtp server! It is possible…
Compiling Python with Readline support on Ubuntu Linux
January 01, 2010Compiling Python on Ubuntu is often necessary for development purposes and for specific versions. Here I’ll show you in a few easy steps how…