Its Saturday night, Germany just won again Denmark (soccer), and I am bored, so what can I do?

Lets code something fun, like I used to do back then, just to see if I can do it. And there is something I always wanted to do but never did. A webcam-ascii-dcc-chat.
And here it is:

As I always do the konversation DCC stuff this was no problem, but even the webcam and ascii part, thanks to aalib and HAsciiCam, was really easy. But this will never end up in a real konversation, or at least I won’t do it, because beside from the fun fact its utterly useless. So no gain, only pain maintaining it. If you still want to try it
git://anongit.kde.org/clones/konversation/buschinski/konv-hacks.git

Thanks to my weak git rebase –interactive skills I managed to the change the author of my
“Implement DCC HasciiCam” commit, I didn’t even know that this was possible but if you can tell me how to change it again I would be happy :)

In other more sane konversation news. Konversation(currently only git master) support SASL for quite a while now and we have a very nice userbase page about how to use it.
http://userbase.kde.org/Konversation/Configuring_SASL_authentication. There are more new features, but this might be the most important one for all mobile-freenode users.

Yeah! It’s been quite a while but finally Konversation 1.4 Beta1 is here! The first pre-release of our next major release, with many changes and fixes.

A brief selection of highlights:

• URL and email detection in text views has been rewritten from scratch, greatly improving the handling of various types of URLs and the contexts they might appear in.
• Extensive improvements to IRC formatting code handling, including the return of background color support.
• Extensive, sometimes full rewrites of user interface elements such as nearly all context menus, the URL Catcher and the Warning Dialogs system for a long list of user interface improvements and bug fixes.
• Improved SSL connection behavior.
• Translation support and various other improvements in several bundled scripts.
• Expanded Python scripting support via the introduction of an API support package.
• Support for more IRC numerics.
• Various bugfixes to input line command handling and connection behavior.

A full list of all new features and changes is available on http://konversation.kde.org/.
I really really love those long and detailed changelogs. :)

In case you are still using Konversation 1.3.1 and experience strange crashes since Qt 4.7.4 update, I highly recommend you to use this 1.4 Beta 1. Or if you really want to stay with 1.3.1 you could fetch the latest commit from the 1.3.1 branch.
Please also note that we have at least one minor style fix for Qt-4.7, so again update is recommend.

It’s been a while since I last blogged, as I was really busy this semester with various projects and exams are still ahead.
But let’s get back to konversation. The DCC part has seen great improvements for the user with UPnP support and lately the Whiteboard extension. So what do you expect next? Oh, yes we still have open whishlist bugs but … oh well…

• Conditional white lists for DCC auto-accept is a great idea and definitely worth implementing
• Automatically abort stalled / timed out DCC receive transfers is a special network problems where the tcp/ip connection is still active but no data is transferred, I don’t think many users have seen it, so the priority for me is rather low. And note transfers with broken connections are already automatically aborted
• Bandwidth control for DCC transfers the oldest and highest voted bug, is rather difficult to implement. Ok easy for send, but impossible for receive via the dcc protocol, as nearly all irc clients don’t wait for the ACK bytes before sending new data. Maybe there is a tcp/ip trick that makes it very easy…

On the other hand lets look what other irc clients have.
KVIrc has voice and video support, which makes it a great all-in-one irc client (except for whiteboard :p). But does konv need voice and video support too? Voice support is cool but for my use-case I want to chat with more than one person at the same time, which kvirc doesn’t over as it seems, or I just couldn’t find it. And it wouldn’t be easy for konv to act as “voice-server” to allow multi-voice-chats too.
The main reason why I implemented whiteboard is that there are not many “network-painting-apps”, but that is not the case for voice and video,.there are many voice and video clients out there. So konv would just reinvent the wheel with disadvantage.
Another big dcc features are xdcc and fserve, important features, but I am not too eager to implement them.

I wonder if I missed something and I am interested to hear your dcc-related ideas :)
But don’t expect me to code anything soon, as the exams are still ahead and after the exams I will be away for 5 weeks walking the Way of St. James

So what is going on in the konv land? Version 1.2.2 will be released soon, which is great enough but I have something even better for you.
Post 1.2.2 we will have DCC Whiteboard!
(imagine the 20th century/fox music: “dadadadaaaa…dadadadaa”)

A basic “multiplayer paint” which implements dcc whiteboard, specs can be found here. It won’t be in 1.2.2 as it is not ready but, as you can see, it basically works :)

Now to the show-stoppers, the whiteboard specs lack many things to keep the drawing 100% in sync.
For example it is impossible to keep the size of the image in sync, it has no real size, but how can you save an image without a size? I ended up resizing the image as needed but with a limit to 2048×2048 pixel, for the sake of all broken gfx drivers. And now imagine one side uses floodfill with a different image size than the other, the result will be different. I *could* implement a extra resize signal, but that is not part of the whiteboard specs.
Also for text if one side uses a really fancy font there is no guarantee that the other side has it as well, so we need another extra “has font” check.
Until now nothing unsolvable, but I have no clue how to keep the picture in sync if both sides draw a rectangle on the same place with a time difference smaller than the network delay.

As conclusion, dcc whiteboard is meant for fun painting, it will never replace a krita or gimp, not even kolourpaint (ok maybe kolourpaint at some point). And dcc whiteboard also shows that dcc is not only made for filesharing ;-)
Try sharing your files with kolourpaint, hm… well I think you could if you really want, but please don’t.

Hi everyone,
my name is Bernd Buschinski (buscher), I am a konversation developer mainly responsible for the dcc part. So if konversation crashed with a dcc backtrace( which will never happen because konversation is rock solid :p ), it was likely my fault.
I am a Computer Science student and just finished my internship. I worked on a screenreader called SUE (Screenreader and Usability Extensions) which is currently aimed for working on the GNOME desktop, but not limited to only work on GNOME. With more back-ends it could, more or less, easily work on any OS and WM (assumed we have some kind of accessibility infrastructure there).

So from now on I will try to keep you up to date with recent exciting konversation changes and maybe some other smalls things too ;-)