I received my Peek back in November and since then have been working on a number of applications to make it more useful to me.

As many of you know, my first significant application is Ent, which is a set of auto-responders that provide a variety of information to Peek (and other email) users. It's become pretty popular, with a fairly steady amount of use.

More recently I turned my attention towards the IM situation. As of today I've been using my Peek to communicate with IRC for three weeks, and Google Talk (Jabber) for the last few days. As promised in the Peek chat over at http://www.dreamers-inc.com/chat/ I'm releasing my clients (collectively called Karere) in hopes they prove helpful to others.

Warning: this is *not* really intended for the average user yet. You'll need to be able to setup a PHP environment with IMAP, sockets, and a working mail() function. It's only been tested on Linux and OS X currently.

Now that my warning is out of the way, here's how it works:

1) Karere runs on a desktop computer
1a) You will need to modify the source for some configuration pieces
1b) These areas are documented in the source
2) It connects to an IM network (IRC or Jabber/Google Talk)
3) Any messages addressed to you (or for IRC, in a channel you are in) get sent to your email
4) You can send messages to a *second* email account and have them sent to the IM network
4a) The second account currently needs to be a gmail account
4b) The second account can't be used for anything else
4c) The subject line is the channel or Google Talk/Jabber user
4d) The body is the message
4e) Yes, you do have to type out the full channel name or email address for Google Talk/Jabber

You'll get one email for each message addressed to you, with hints in the subject to help identify the source.

This *can* lead to a lot of email, but as I said - it does work, and it gets you IM today. Response times will be much better once 1.09 comes out, as that will give push email reducing wait times between incoming messages and responses to a few seconds to a minute rather than several minutes as it currently sits.

So, if you want to try them, get the code at http://charleschilders.com/karere/karere-alpha.tar.gz

A few updates since I upliaded the code:

#1: I've noticed that the Jabber client tends to die out after several (4-6) hours of running. I think I know the reason, and will hopefully have a fix in place within the next few days.

#2: I was able to get the Jabber client to connect under Windows, but sending messages failed due to configuration problems. As soon as I get this working, I'll put together a nice installer package for Windows.

#3: The IRC code is running very well. Over the last two days I've received/sent over 500 messages using it.

I hope you signed up for geekypeek.com contest.

malkboy - you need to brainstorm a concept? If yes.. I'd be happy to help with that in a chat room somewhere... :) Can't help with the actual coding, though.

Your absence? Is that what you call all these postings to the discussion boards? :)

Further updates:

1) I lost my main connection at home, so am using a tethered connection through my wife's metropcs phone
2) This means that I can't test as easily since the metropcs blocks ports other than 443 and 3128
3) I am still working on it, just slower
4) I found some bugs in the IRC code and am almost done fixing them. (Note: gmail doesn't like being checked frequently; I keep getting rejections and have to stop using the service for a while. I'm using my own email server now. [and thanks to Tom, I can also use my domain on my Peek, which is nice!])
5) Expect to see some updated code by Monday evening; or sooner if I can get a better connection at home

@Crc - If you make it, they will come. :-)

Tom: I have no doubts, but a rough idea of how many users I can expect would be helpful in deciding whether or not to do it. (There is a question of resources; Ent is fairly low on the resource hit (CPU+bandwidth), IM is much heavier, at least on CPU usage on the server).

Thanks, crc! You da man! Would be a nice thing to have with Spring storms about to roll in every day.

And now the Ent weather service comes with more maps (infrared, satellite, water vapor, temperature, as well as radar). Still working on local radar images...

Yeah, crc, that upgrade is awesome. I saw the suggestion here and tried it out before you had confirmed it was live. Brilliant!

CRC.. you rock man!

Thanks for this, CRC. Now I don't have to reinvent the wheel. This is almost exactly what I was looking for. :) I added a few lines to tweak so I didn't have to reformat everytime I got an email to reply to someone. I'm also using a different XMPP so I can use AIM and Yahoo.

Here's the diff:
diff karere.php karere-alpha/jabber/karere.php
37c37
< $conn = new XMPPHP_XMPP('jabber.belnet.be', 5222, $acct, $acctPass, 'xmpphp', 'jabber.belnet.be', $printlog=true, $loglevel=XMPPHP_Log::LEVEL_INFO);
---
> $conn = new XMPPHP_XMPP('talk.google.com', 5222, $acct, $acctPass, 'xmpphp', 'gmail.com', $printlog=true, $loglevel=XMPPHP_Log::LEVEL_INFO);
92,98c92,93
< $body=substr($body, 0, strpos($body, "------"));
< $body=quoted_printable_decode($body);
< $body=str_replace("= ","",$body);
< $body=preg_replace("/(^[\r\n]*|[\r\n]+)[\s\t]*[\r\n]+/", "", $body);
< $subject=str_replace("Re: jabber: ","",$subject);
< echo $subject . ":" . $body . "\n";
< $conn->message("$subject","$body");
---
> echo $subject . ":" . $body . "\n";
> $conn->message($subject, $body);

Yea; MSN works too. You just use the jabber server's transports. Right now as the server I'm using doesn't have good Yahoo support, I'm building up a jabber server.

Register for an account on the server; register the servers from service discovery (I use Psi for this part), then set up the script with the changes.

When someone IMs you, I modified it so that it reforms the subject that it receives so you can just hit reply.

CRC: want to setup a SVN/GIT for this maybe?

Well, if your Microwave is IP connected... no problem. ;)

hehe

Cool, I forked if that's how I'm supposed to do it to put my changes...

The current changes so far are there; they're just some cleaning up on the parsing of email. I'm going to add notification to the user when a message is received. I have to do this when I get home because I'll have to create a new AIM account because there were too many people that got notified about themselves being "online"... hehe

dalbaech: I've merged in your changes.

I have also updated both clients with one new feature: Send @off as a subject to disable receiving messages and @on to start receiving messages again.

does anyone know how to set this up with facebook chat? I can't seem to find any information about networks etc. to login into. I did find this though: http://lifehacker.com/396473/facebook-chat-plug+in-integrates-facebook-with-pidgin which means that it is accessible outside of the browser by at least 2 different chat clients, but I'm unsure how.

Karere does not yet support facebook chat.

There are two reasons I haven't launched this as a service yet:

1) My server blocks IRC access
2) Even running on my local machine, it puts a lot of strain on the system

Once I have a way around these issues, I hope to offer it as a service.