I have a love hate relationship with instant messaging programs such as kopete, kmerlin, gabber, psi, et al.
Right now I'm solidly stuck in the *hate* phase of the cycle.
The main problem I have is the user interface of these programs.
Almost universally all instant messaging programs present your contacts as a tree structure - perhaps with the ability to create groups and move different contacts into different groups.
My irriration is that this isn't the UI I want. Most strongly this comes from MSN Messenger, and the programs which implment that protocol.
Using MSN Messenger people are allowed to choose their own Nick when they login - this nick is displayed upon all the peoples contact list who have that user listed.
I don't want to see the nick they chose themself - I want to *assign* a nick for them.
I also want to assign data to each contact such as "Location", "Interests", "Phone nubmer", "Cuteness ;)".
With that in mind I'd prefer to see a "grid" control for displaying contacts - with different headers that could be chosen to include/exclude different pieces of information.
(This doesn't preculde a tree structure additionally).
The other thing that I'd like to see is the ability to add a contact into *multiple* groups - something that the standard tree structure of these systems doesn't seem to allow.
It's entirely possible I'll want to file somebody under both "work" and "friends" groups for example - or "lover" and "friend", or "Friend" and "Local".
None of the systems are flexible enough to allow this - I downloaded the source to KMerlin to see how easy it would be to hack, and decided "not very".
I might look at one of the bazillion MSN programs on Freshmeat and see if I can find a project in it's infancy I can contribute towards...
Debian Security
I got two new DSA's published as a result of debian security auditting.
This time I even built the fixed packages instead of just contributing a context diff for the fix.
It feels very rewarding to make such a contribution.
Massive thanks to the security team who do such a good job.
Work
I've just done some work setting up a bandwidth limitted server for a friend - along with FTP, Apache, etc.
A fun few hours work and for bonus points I got paid too! (OK I will get paid). <hr />
Still looking for a new job......... in Edinburgh. Using Linux/Solaris/etc.