techwalla

Changes afoot: Partychat moving to a new home

2011-11-10T10:06:00.001-05:00

There are some changes coming to Partychat over the next few days, and while we hope they won’t have too big an impact on you, we wanted to explain what’s happening.

When Partychat was born, it ran on an ancient desktop in my living room. Two years ago, we moved it over to Google’s App Engine, which made Partychat much more stable and allowed us to add new features more easily. (In case you're not a programmer, App Engine is a platform that allows users to build web apps using Google's infrastructure). App Engine provides a certain amount of resources for free, and at the time, Partychat was small enough that we didn’t have to pay anything. Over time we’ve grown and in recent months we’ve been paying a bit more than $2 per day in fees to run the service.

Recently, Google decided to change their pricing model for App Engine, making Partychat significantly more expensive to operate. In fact, their initially announced prices would have caused Partychat to cost $250 per day at current usage levels (and mind you, we’ve doubled in size over the last 9 months). Google later revised these prices to a more reasonable level, but we would still be paying $25 per day under the new pricing model. $25 may not sound like a lot, but that’s $9,000 per year—and we’re committed to keeping Partychat free, with no advertising, so we literally have no source of revenue other than our own pockets and your kind donations.

We had hoped Google would change its mind yet again and lower prices further, to a sustainable level for us, but that hasn’t happened, and the new prices went into effect this Monday. So we’ve been forced to move Partychat over to Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computing platform, where we calculate that we can run the service for less than what we were paying even before App Engine’s pricing change*.

As sad as we are to be leaving App Engine, this migration has an upside for us (aside from the savings) in that we’ll finally be able to move Partychat rooms to our custom partych.at domain. In fact, this should be the biggest change you’ll see as part of the migration: Instead of chatting with rooms in partychapp.appspot.com, you’ll now be chatting with them in partych.at. Your room state (members, aliases, ++points, etc.) will stay the same**.

We’ll be embarking on the migration sometime over the next few days. Please bear with us—we’ll try our best, but we don’t expect this to be a completely flawless transition. A huge, incredible thanks to Vijay who has been doing all the work to make the migration happen. And if you love Partychat as much as we do, consider donating to help it keep running for a long time.

-- Akshay

* During this transition, we've had to suspend rooms with more than 100 participants as these few rooms represent a disproportionately large portion of our costs. We hope to reinstate these rooms soon after we've fully migrated Partychat to EC2 and have everyone else running stably. To help keep future costs under control, we may start adding limitations to the number of people and/or the amount traffic in each room. We’ll be keeping you up to date here in this blog, and via our twitter account: @partychat

** In fact, we’re still using App Engine database for the next few weeks. The price hike was for outgoing XMPP messages, which we will now avoid by sending messages via EC2. We’ll write more about this soon.

Status update, and how to donate

2011-08-17T10:16:00.007-04:00

Thanks to your help, Partychat has been growing like crazy! In fact, 10,000 people say something in Partychat every day now. We’re ecstatic so many of you find it as useful as we do, and so many of you are using it on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, this crazy awesome level of usage has caused us to exceed App Engine’s free resource quota. We’ve been optimizing to stretch the resources out as far as possible, but as our user base grows (yay!) our costs do too (booo!). Thankfully, users have been offering to contribute for a while, and we’ve finally gotten around to making a standard way for you to help:

Donate to Partychat by clicking here. Payments are processed through Amazon and are used solely to defray our server costs. It now runs us upwards of $15 to run Partychat for a week... almost $800 a year. If you use and value Partychat please contribute!

Side note for developers: I recently migrated the Partychat Google Code repository to git from svn. If you’re working on any changes or patches, be sure to re-sync this repository. (And if you weren’t, remember: patches welcome!). The migration process was a bit confusing, and I’ll be writing a separate blog post on that process soon.

Vijay, for the Partychat team.

More Sharing Features

2011-02-21T23:51:00.000-05:00

We've enhanced the /share command to use Embedly for generating titles and descriptions of shared links. For example, this means that tweet text is now rendered inline, saving you a click. For YouTube links to get the video description, saving you from possible rickrolls.

Rooms now also have a share bookmarklet, you can find it in the "Helpful links" section of the web interface.

Finally, the share command can also be hooked up to Google Reader's Send to feature. Just go to the settings page and add a custom link with this template:

Stats Update!

2011-01-21T15:40:00.000-05:00

It's been a while since we updated you about Partychat's growth, so here are some numbers for those of you playing along at home:

Over 8,500 people said something in Partychat yesterday
Over 17,000 people in the last week
Over 25,000 people in the last 30 days
There are over 2,800 Partychat channels
Partychat sent out around 8,000,000 (yup, million) messages yesterday

For the more visually inclined, here's a graph of our growth over the last 8 months or so:

Controlling logging (and FAQs)

2010-11-17T11:25:00.000-05:00

To enable commands such as /undo and the search-and-replace feature, Partychat keeps a small log of recent messages said in the room (up to 10 for each member). However, we realize that not everyone wants even this form of limited logging, so we've added a preference on the room's web page (accessible at http://partychapp.appspot.com/room/<room name>) that lets you turn off logging:

You can also enable and disable logging by using the /togglelogging command in the room itself.

We also added an FAQ about what gets logged (not just by Partychat, but by Gmail and your chat client). We didn't actually have an FAQ until now, so we took this opportunity to also write up some of Partychat's more esoteric features, like the PlusPlusBot. If there's anything else that you find confusing about Partychat, feel free to get in touch (how to do that is...wait for it...also in the FAQ).

Fun with aliases

2010-11-08T08:00:00.002-05:00

We've recently loosened up restrictions for aliases, so now nearly any Unicode character can be used in them, even a snowman:.

What you type: /alias ☃
What the room sees: 'frosty' is now known as '☃'

Combined with existing support for Unicode support in messages, this can lead to silliness:

What you type: /me <3s ❄
What the room sees: ☃ s ❄

And if you ever wonder who's hiding behind an overly clever alias, you can use the /who command.

What you type: /who ☃
What you get back: ☃ (frosty@gmail.com) (online)

P.S. More usefully, this means that non-Latin alphabet speakers can now use aliases with their preferred character set.

Partychat turns 5k!

2010-07-21T11:40:00.000-04:00

Short version: Partychat hit 5,000 active users today! We're super excited - it's a special number for us (see below for why) and a big thanks goes out to Mihai & Neil for their work improving Partychat over the last year!

Long version: Back in April 2007, Mihai and Michael made a bet - the first to build a product, in their spare time, with 5,000 users won. At the time, Mihai was about to launch plusplusbot and Michael was working on something called "statusfest" (sorta like Google Buzz - it tracked your Google Talk status, had a "like" operator, and promoted popular statuses). In our words back then:

["mihai"] just to be clear, the site is still not ready for public consumption
["mihai"] so I haven't beaten statusfest.com yet
["ihavemisplacedmypants"] there's still a lot of time until tomorrow...
["mihai"] first one to be posted about on persistent.info or bolin changeblog respectively wins
["mihai"] first one to not suck too
["ihavemisplacedmypants"] i think the second criterion is more important
["alkie"] first one to 1K users?
["ihavemisplacedmypants"] that seems like a more fair metric of not sucking
["mihai"] sure
["ihavemisplacedmypants"] though can we choose a number that's bigger than persistent.info's readership
["dbentley"] Hahaha.
["ihavemisplacedmypants"] 5K?
["ak"] mihai++ for roping bolin into a contest to get statusfest done
woot! mihai->20 (for roping bolin into a contest to get statusfest done)
["ihavemisplacedmypants"] mihai-- for roping bolin into a contest to get statusfest done
ouch! mihai->19 (for roping bolin into a contest to get statusfest done)
["ak"] hey now
["ihavemisplacedmypants"] let's settle on a number of users, though, that defines the goal/winner
["dbentley"] Define user?
["mihai"] for ppb.com, user that has done an increment/decrement
["mihai"] for statusfest.com, user that has his/her status monitored
["mihai"] fair?
["ihavemisplacedmypants"] fair
["ihavemisplacedmypants"] 5K?
["mihai"] sure
["ihavemisplacedmypants"] ok, it's on
["mihai"] what's the prize?
["ihavemisplacedmypants"] eternal glory?
["bitchlaplap"] can it involve cross-dressing
ak would try to join the contest, but is skeptical that partychat could ever get to 5k

plusplusbot eventually reached 1k users, but the 5k user goal was more elusive than we thought.

Over the last year, Mihai and Neil put a lot of work into improving Partychat, taking it from an XMPP bot running out of my apartment to a properly hosted, distributed system (thanks to Google App Engine) with many more features (and, subsequently, more users).

We started with a pretty loose definition of "user" - if we count every person to ever say something in Partychat, Partychat reached 5k users back in February 2008. "People who ever said something" is a pretty lame measurement though. A better metric of usage is 7-day active users - people who've said something in Partychat in the last week. Back in February 2008 we still had fewer than a thousand 7-day active users. Today we can proudly say that Partychat has 5k 7-day active users.

Below you can see how Partychat usage has grown spectacularly in 2010. If you squint, you can see that we've also hit 2.5k 1-day users, which, you know, is pretty awesome. Thanks to all you users for your continued bug reports, feature requests, and additions! We had a couple of beers last night to celebrate, we encourage you to do the same =). See you at 10k!

Fun with web hooks

2010-06-22T00:25:00.003-04:00

As alluded to on Twitter by Kushal, Partychat-hooks is a ~~nerdy~~fun companion to Partychat that lets you send and receive data from Partychat rooms via WebHooks.

To give a sample use case, here's how to add a "commitbot" that notifies a room whenever there's a commit made on a code.google.com project (Jehiah provides samples for other project hosting sites).

Add a hook bot to the room that you wish to send messages to. It'll get assigned a hook ID of the form hookID@partychat-hooks.appspotchat.com
If the room is invite-only, invite the hook bot to the room (by using /invite hookID@partychat-hooks.appspotchat.com
(Optional) give the hook bot a nicer alias by using the appropriate form on its edit page
Create a new post hook
Copy its HTTP endpoint URL (of the form http://partychat-hooks.appspot.com/post/hookID) into the WebHook field of the "Source" page of the "Administer" tab on your code.google.com project

Use this format to parse the commit data into a message that will be sent to the room (this page explains more about the JSON format):


{% for r in json_decode(request.body).get("revisions") %}
  {{r.get('author')}} committed: {{r.get('message')}}
  http://code.google.com/p/{{
      json_decode(request.body).get("project_name")
      }}/source/detail?r={{r.get('revision')}}
{% end %}

Then, a few seconds after the commit, you'll get a notification:

Friendlier web interface, /share is back, and more

2010-05-19T11:38:00.001-04:00

Here's some recent changes that I've made to Partychat:

Make the homepage friendlier (and slightly prettier), especially the room creation form.
Improve web-based room management (building on what David started), so that you can join, leave, or request an invitation from the room's web page (here's a sample room for the current developers).
Prettify the plusplusbot display in the web UI.
Add a /share command that makes it easy to share URLs and give some context.
Clean up some data layer issues and fix some inconsistencies.
And of course, quite a few bug fixes (nothing like scanning the AppEngine logs looking for NPEs).

There's also been some recent production issues that have kept me busy. For example, yesterday a user invited room A as a member of room B, and vice-versa. As an unintentional side-effect of a change that I made to make the setup process more user-friendly, it became very easy to set off an infinite loop of messages. By the time I realized what was going on, we'd run out of App Engine bandwidth quota. Thankfully after some budget rejiggering and a some quick code change all was well. Similarly, a couple of weeks ago we had CPU usage issues (though optimizing that away was still fun).

It seems like chat is gaining in trendyness, with HipChat launching recently (presumably to challenge the incumbent Campfire) and Brizzly/Thing Labs's Picnics happening. Partychat will probably remain a hobby/fit-within-AppEngine-free-quota sort of project indefinitely, but it's been fun polishing it (and of coure, there's still quite a few things left to fix).

Semi-cross-posted from Mihai's blog.

Partychapp not responding to messages

2010-02-24T13:18:00.003-05:00

Partychapp appears online, but is not responding to messages. We're not sure why, but we're assuming it's an issue with AppEngine. Will investigate

Update: Back to normal - issues were due to http://code.google.com/status/appengine

Back to the Beta

2009-10-08T13:26:00.003-04:00

Marty McFly: Doc, we better back up. We don't have enough road to get up to 88.
Dr. Emmett Brown: Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads.

I'm happy to announce the first major step towards a more reliable, stable, and feature-rich Partychat: Partychapp β.

For the past few weeks, a rogue group of friends have been dedicating their spare time to porting PartyChat over to Google AppEngine. We'd talked about doing this for a long time, but the recently added XMPP support was the missing piece needed to make the whole thing run.

As with the old Partychat, Partychapp is open source and you can track its development through the associated Google Code feeds.

What makes Partychapp better? 95% of Partychat's issues were the result of our Jabber connection -- rate limiting, federation issues, etc. Because Partychapp uses AppEngine's XMPP bridge, jabber connectivity is vastly improved with Partychapp. And those remaining 5% of issues with Partychat? They generally had to do with data persistence, which again AppEngine deals with much more effectively.

Why beta? There are a number of features missing and bugs we need to fix. To track them (and add more!) see: Partychapp Issues. Also AppEngine XMPP doesn't (yet) support custom domains so we can't move partych.at over.

So check out Partychapp β. Instructions on how to set up a room (including a web-based invites system!) can be found at http://partychapp.appspot.com/.

Big, giant, overwhelming thanks go out to Neil, Jason, Kushal, and David who are the people responsible for making Partychapp happen. A special shout out to mpd who added XMPP support to AppEngine, making this all possible.

New /share command

2009-08-21T16:16:00.002-04:00

PartyChat is pretty good place to share and talk about links you come across. To make it even easier, we've added a /share url [annotation] command. This command looks up the title of the web page at url and then broadcasts it to the entire party chat, optionally with an annotation.

In other PartyChat news, the source has moved to Project Hosting on Google Code. Among other things this means that there are lots of feeds for keeping up with PartyChat development.

fixing "offline" partych.at bots

2009-07-21T21:03:00.003-04:00

Because of some previous issues, partych.at bots you've friended before will probably appear offline for you (new bots, however, should appear online just fine)

To make the bots appear online again:

If you're using something like Pidgin, you can "unsubscribe" and then "re-request authorization" to the bot.

If you're using gmail chat (or something similar) go to the "Add Contact" dialogue and re-enter the partych.at addresses you were using.

partych.at bots fixed

2009-07-15T12:58:00.005-04:00

We (ok, Craig) figured out why @partych.at bots were not accepting new invites -- basically we'd hit the number of un-answered invites the jabber server could buffer. Clearing this buffer appears to have fixed the invite issue.

This is probably unrelated to the dropped messages issue. I did upgrade the PartyChat server from Smack 3.0.1 to 3.1.0 last night which can only help.

If you're still seeing offline issues or dropped messages, keep letting us know (via comments on this blog is good) and we'll keep poking around till we get this thing fixed.

Update: partych.at bots may appear offline for you. This is because the partych.at XMPP server's roster database (i.e. who is friends with who) is now out-of-sync with your chat client. If you're using something like Pidgin, you can "unsubscribe" and then "re-request authorization" to the bot. If you're in a GMail based client, we're still trying to figure out how to do it.

Update 2: If you're using gmail chat (or something similar) go to the "Add Contact" dialogue and re-enter the partych.at addresses you were using. This will cause them to re-appear as online to you.

Missing bots and dropped messages

2009-07-13T15:48:00.004-04:00

As many of you are aware, there are a number of problems with partychat right now; ranging from bots appearing offline to missing messages.

A few of us are trying diagnose what the underlying issues are. In general, these sorts of problems seem to stem from our connection to Google Talk servers which we have very little control over. Hopefully we'll get everything sorted out and fixed to the best of our ability soon.

Thanks to everyone who's been reporting problems -- it's touching to hear how many different people around the world are using partychat (and I share your frustration with how much of a disruption to your life it is when it's not working properly).

Apartment internet is out

2009-05-14T11:17:00.003-04:00

So partychat is down too. Will bring it back up when connectivity is restored.

Update: This appears to actually be an issue with Google connectivity (PartyChat uses Google Talk as its Jabber host)

Update: Aaaaaand we're back!

so much for dual-homing

2008-09-10T11:59:00.003-04:00

Well, we're in the process of switching service providers and Mihai's power just went out, so our "dual homing, it can't fail!" strategy is not looking so solid now. The state file is lost behind's Mihai's power failure, so rather than roll back the hands of time yet again, I've brought up tahcytrap@gmail.com (you remember tahcytrap, don't you?). I've purposely given it no state or ppblog -- it's a temporary hold-over for the pchat addicts out there. When we're able to get PartyChat running back and proper, I'll take tahcytrap back down.

Update: everything back to normal now

and again

2008-08-27T15:52:00.002-04:00

Well things got blanked and it turns out the automated backups were corrupted (they were incomplete files, thus bad XML. I don't know why), so I had to turn the clock back to 6/26.

I wish I could promise things were going to get more stable, but I don't have much time these days to do anything but tend to pchat's fires. c'est la vie i guess

i'm sorry

2008-06-25T22:42:00.007-04:00

The woeful tail of how I lost the last 3 months of your PartyChat room data

I run a pretty spit 'n polish establishment here at Techwalla. And by that I mean, PartyChat runs on a "dedicated" P3 900Mhz machine in my living room, which emits a high pitched whine and occasional harddrive clack, much to the discomfort of anyone trying to sleep on the couch next to it. When PartyChat has issues, I log into the machine and restart things. There are many things that can go wrong with this, unfortunately there's been little incentive for me to improve the situation. We have some plans to make things much more stable (Real Soon Now™), but they're a ways off.

Anyways, I accidentally (whoops) deleted the file that stores all of the state for each PartyChat room (mainly: what rooms exist, who's in what room, what their alias is). The last back-up I have is from April 2nd (ouch). I've gone and substituted in that file, so you'll notice that your rooms have just hoped into a time-machine back 3 months (old aliases, old membership rosters). If you created a PartyChat room after April 2nd (and this is the part I'm really sorry about) you're going to have to re-make that room.

Clearly I should have been making more regular (off-site even!) backups of the state file and you bet your bottom that's what I'm going to start doing now. But that's cold comfort... and I'm sorry.

issues w/ the federation

2008-04-02T13:17:00.003-04:00

We're occasionally seeing issues where messages between non-Google domains (e.g. partych.at) and Google domains (e.g. gmail.com) are not being delivered (this is the "xxxx did not get your message" errors you sometimes get).
I'm sorry to say there's nothing I can really do about this but I've e-mailed the Google Talk team about it and it should resolve itself fairly quickly (hopefully permanently).

Official Google talk group chat, PartyChat, and You

2007-11-29T14:38:00.000-05:00

As many of you have undoubtedly discovered, Google supports group chat functionality for Google Talk and today added this support to GMail Chat. I've been asked what this means with respect to PartyChat, so I figured I'd write down answers for you, the larger audience.

Officiality: Google's group chat offers official group chat behavior for Google talk users. PartyChat is not a product of Google (it's a personal pet project) and has no official support other than what I have time to personally give.

Who can use it: The announced group chat only works for Google Talk users (i.e. @gmail accounts or users of Google Apps). PartyChat works with with all Jabber accounts. If you don't know what Jabber is, don't worry. If you do... well, then there you go.

Persistence: Google's group chat functionality is designed for one-off conversations. You're talking with X and realize you want to add Y into the conversation. Or maybe you have some specific short-term goal in mind (organizing dinner, say) and have no use for a multi-user chat channel for future use. Once you close the window for a group chat, you've exited that chat forever. PartyChat is designed to be a persistent group chat channel. You stay in the group chat even if you log out. You don't have to re-invite people each time you want to have a discussion.
For temporary chats, Google talk group chat is the easiest to use. If you have a long term goal in mind, or maybe just want a lasting social forum, then PartyChat will probably satisfy your needs better.

Accessibility: Because Google's group chat feature is specific to Google Talk, you must use the Google gadget/client to participate. If you use other chat clients (e.g. iChat, Pidgin, Meebo, a Blackberry, etc.) for Google Talk then you can't enter these group chats. Because PartyChat sits within the network, you use PartyChat from any device that sends/receives messages on the Google Talk/Jabber network.

I'm happy that Google now has wide-spread support for group chat, but I still think there's a need for the special features that PartyChat provides. My friends and I will continue working and supporting PartyChat, so enjoy using both!

PartyChat on Facebook

2007-11-27T23:30:00.000-05:00

PartyChat now has its own fan page on Facebook. Show your Facebook friends you're a PartyChat fan and help spread the love!

PartyChat is growing up

2007-10-28T21:39:00.000-04:00

PartyChat has thus far used Google Talk accounts for its bots, since that was easiest from a maintenance perspective (no separate Jabber server to run). However, we are now running into rate-limiting issues with GoogleTalk, so the time has come for us to run our own Jabber server. We've now bought the partych.at domain, and have set up these bots:

partychat@partych.at
partychat0@partych.at
partychat1@partych.at
partychat2@partych.at
partychat3@partych.at
partychat4@partych.at
partychat5@partych.at
partychat6@partych.at
partychat7@partych.at
partychat8@partych.at
partychat9@partych.at

You can use any of these bots with our regular instructions. Eventually there will be a migration plan from the @gmail.com bots, hopefully in as transparent as way as possible.

And if you were curious just what usage level we're up that rate limiting is being triggered, here are some stats:

Total party chats: 846
Party chats active in the past week: 247
Average subscribers per chat: 2.39
Most subscribers in a chat: 35

Total subscribers: 2020
Subscribers active in the past week: 741

Today's issues...

2007-10-07T14:27:00.001-04:00

As a lot of you are probably seeing, PartyChat has been very flakey today. I'm still trying to figure out what's happening, so if any of you are smack experts, I could appreciate the help.

The previously running process starts reporting:

[java] Found invalid presence mode

Upon restarting, it outputs:

[java] Trouble connecting to Google Talk

and on a few occasions:

[java] Trouble connecting to Google Talk
[java] java.net.SocketException: Broken pipe
[java] at java.net.SocketOutputStream.socketWrite0(Native Method)
[java] at java.net.SocketOutputStream.socketWrite(SocketOutputStream.java:92)
[java] at java.net.SocketOutputStream.write(SocketOutputStream.java:136)
[java] at sun.nio.cs.StreamEncoder$CharsetSE.writeBytes(StreamEncoder.java:336)
[java] at sun.nio.cs.StreamEncoder$CharsetSE.implFlushBuffer(StreamEncoder.java:404)
[java] at sun.nio.cs.StreamEncoder$CharsetSE.implFlush(StreamEncoder.java:408)
[java] at sun.nio.cs.StreamEncoder.flush(StreamEncoder.java:152)
[java] at java.io.OutputStreamWriter.flush(OutputStreamWriter.java:213)
[java] at java.io.BufferedWriter.flush(BufferedWriter.java:236)
[java] at org.jivesoftware.smack.PacketWriter.writePackets(PacketWriter.java:274)
[java] at org.jivesoftware.smack.PacketWriter.access$000(PacketWriter.java:40)
[java] at org.jivesoftware.smack.PacketWriter$1.run(PacketWriter.java:87)
[java] java.net.SocketException: Connection reset
[java] at java.net.SocketInputStream.read(SocketInputStream.java:168)
[java] at sun.nio.cs.StreamDecoder$CharsetSD.readBytes(StreamDecoder.java:411)
[java] at sun.nio.cs.StreamDecoder$CharsetSD.implRead(StreamDecoder.java:453)
[java] at sun.nio.cs.StreamDecoder.read(StreamDecoder.java:183)
[java] at java.io.InputStreamReader.read(InputStreamReader.java:167)
[java] at java.io.BufferedReader.fill(BufferedReader.java:136)
[java] at java.io.BufferedReader.read1(BufferedReader.java:187)
[java] at java.io.BufferedReader.read(BufferedReader.java:261)
[java] at org.xmlpull.mxp1.MXParser.fillBuf(MXParser.java:2971)
[java] at org.xmlpull.mxp1.MXParser.more(MXParser.java:3025)
[java] at org.xmlpull.mxp1.MXParser.nextImpl(MXParser.java:1144)
[java] at org.xmlpull.mxp1.MXParser.next(MXParser.java:1093)
[java] at org.jivesoftware.smack.PacketReader.parsePackets(PacketReader.java:368)
[java] at org.jivesoftware.smack.PacketReader.access$000(PacketReader.java:44)
[java] at org.jivesoftware.smack.PacketReader$1.run(PacketReader.java:76)

[java] java.net.SocketException: Socket closed
[java] at java.net.SocketOutputStream.socketWrite(SocketOutputStream.java:99)
[java] at java.net.SocketOutputStream.write(SocketOutputStream.java:136)
[java] at sun.nio.cs.StreamEncoder$CharsetSE.writeBytes(StreamEncoder.java:336)
[java] at sun.nio.cs.StreamEncoder$CharsetSE.implFlushBuffer(StreamEncoder.java:404)
[java] at sun.nio.cs.StreamEncoder$CharsetSE.implFlush(StreamEncoder.java:408)
[java] at sun.nio.cs.StreamEncoder.flush(StreamEncoder.java:152)
[java] at java.io.OutputStreamWriter.flush(OutputStreamWriter.java:213)
[java] at java.io.BufferedWriter.flush(BufferedWriter.java:236)
[java] at org.jivesoftware.smack.PacketWriter.writePackets(PacketWriter.java:274)
[java] at org.jivesoftware.smack.PacketWriter.access$000(PacketWriter.java:40)
[java] at org.jivesoftware.smack.PacketWriter$1.run(PacketWriter.java:87)
[java] javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: Remote host closed connection during handshake
[java] at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.readRecord(SSLSocketImpl.java:739)
[java] at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.performInitialHandshake(SSLSocketImpl.java:1025)
[java] at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.startHandshake(SSLSocketImpl.java:1038)
[java] at org.jivesoftware.smack.XMPPConnection.proceedTLSReceived(XMPPConnection.java:1127)
[java] at org.jivesoftware.smack.PacketReader.parsePackets(PacketReader.java:313)
[java] at org.jivesoftware.smack.PacketReader.access$000(PacketReader.java:44)
[java] at org.jivesoftware.smack.PacketReader$1.run(PacketReader.java:76)
[java] Caused by: java.io.EOFException: SSL peer shut down incorrectly
[java] at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.InputRecord.read(InputRecord.java:321)
[java] at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.readRecord(SSLSocketImpl.java:720)
[java] ... 6 more
[java] java.net.SocketException: Connection closed by remote host
[java] at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.checkWrite(SSLSocketImpl.java:1168)
[java] at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.AppOutputStream.write(AppOutputStream.java:43)
[java] at sun.nio.cs.StreamEncoder$CharsetSE.writeBytes(StreamEncoder.java:336)
[java] at sun.nio.cs.StreamEncoder$CharsetSE.implFlushBuffer(StreamEncoder.java:404)
[java] at sun.nio.cs.StreamEncoder$CharsetSE.implFlush(StreamEncoder.java:408)
[java] at sun.nio.cs.StreamEncoder.flush(StreamEncoder.java:152)
[java] at java.io.OutputStreamWriter.flush(OutputStreamWriter.java:213)
[java] at java.io.BufferedWriter.flush(BufferedWriter.java:236)
[java] at org.jivesoftware.smack.PacketWriter.writePackets(PacketWriter.java:274)
[java] at org.jivesoftware.smack.PacketWriter.access$000(PacketWriter.java:40)
[java] at org.jivesoftware.smack.PacketWriter$1.run(PacketWriter.java:87)
[java] java.io.EOFException: no more data available - expected end tag to close start tag from line 1, parser stopped on END_TAG seen ...... @1:342
[java] at org.xmlpull.mxp1.MXParser.fillBuf(MXParser.java:3014)
[java] at org.xmlpull.mxp1.MXParser.more(MXParser.java:3025)
[java] at org.xmlpull.mxp1.MXParser.nextImpl(MXParser.java:1144)
[java] at org.xmlpull.mxp1.MXParser.next(MXParser.java:1093)
[java] at org.jivesoftware.smack.PacketReader.parsePackets(PacketReader.java:368)
[java] at org.jivesoftware.smack.PacketReader.access$000(PacketReader.java:44)
[java] at org.jivesoftware.smack.PacketReader$1.run(PacketReader.java:76)

While getting these errors, I was able to log partychat@ in to Google Talk via GMail Chat. Running PartyChat on other machines has a little more success, but not really -- half the accounts still die, but a few are able to connect.

Before I chalk this up to some sort of weird rate-limiting issue, I'm hoping someone can give me a more plausible explanation of what be happening. Any ideas?

Using PartyChat, with pictures

2007-10-04T13:45:00.000-04:00

Add partychat#@gmail.com as a contact (where '#' is any number from 0 to 9):

To start a new party chat, think of a partychat name and password and send them in a message:
/make mycoolgroup secretpassword

To invite your friends, give them the name and password.

To join an existing party chat, send this message:
/join mycoolgroup secretpassword

To leave a party chat (not that you'll ever want to), send this:
/leave

Generally you never want to /leave a partychat... that way you can continue receiving messages even after you've closed the window or logged out!

More features you never asked for

2007-05-13T19:03:00.000-04:00

There's been a flurry of changes to PartyChat lately, so I feel the need to shout-out some love to everyone who's been pitching in.

Dolapo spends much of his life fantasizing about what it would be like if he were a dinosaur who spoke Perl. Unfortunately for him, he's really really bad at writing regular expressions (I'm not kidding, he's terrible). To compensate, he added a feature so you can now correct your past errors thanks to the power of regexps.
me: man, Kushal sure is horny today.
whoops
s/ho/co/
partychat: "dolapo" meant man, Kushal sure is corny today
I won't lie, a lot of us spend far too much time at work using PartyChat, which isn't much of a productivity boost. Sometimes you really need to focus, so on my behest, Dolapo implemented a /snooze feature which allows you to ignore the inane babble of your friends for a while without having to exit a chat. Just type something like /snooze 45m and then enjoy 45 minutes of productive serenity.

Wondering why Dolapo had -56 ++points despite implementing useful features, the ever resourceful Mihai added a /reasons command which prints out the reasons for someone's ++point score
me: /reasons dolapo
partychat: dolapo:-56
  increment by steve...@gmail.com
  decrement by ak...@q00p.net (for not helping)
  decrement by ak...@q00p.net (for making my eyes bleed)
  ...
Programmers are notoriously bad about writing documentation, and PartyChat developers are no exception. In order to force better hygiene on us, Michael refactored my (ugly, ugly) command parser and made it easier to update the help messages that prints when you type /commands. So thanks to him, you can now learn everything you wanted to know about PartyChat but were too afraid to ask.

PartyChat's back up!

2007-05-12T14:08:00.000-04:00

We had a different issue than we previously though, so I'm happy to say that we're back up earlier than I thought. All your old rooms and ++points should be back.

gah!

2007-05-09T18:21:00.000-04:00

As you may have noticed, the partychat#@gmail accounts are down right now. Due to a series of SNAFUs, I can't restart them till Monday morning. In the meantime, we have a temporary PartyChat instance running at tahcytrap@gmail.com. You'll have to recreate/rejoin your chat rooms (/make room-name & /join room-name), but hopefully that'll tide you over until I can restart the regular system on Monday.

Sorry about that =/. I feel even worse than the twitter kitty.

P.S. A big thanks to Michael for temp hosting in the meantime!

PartyChat flakiness

2007-05-03T15:20:00.000-04:00

Apologies for the higher-than-average PartyChat flakiness recently, we've hopefully fixed the problem, so things should be stabler moving forward.

The problem, for those who are curious, is that PartyChat uses the Smack library to connect to Google Talk. Google Talk was sending us delayed information (e.g. offline chat) information with poorly formatted time stamps (e.g. "200753T17:56:30") which would cause the connection to die. My friend, and new PartyChat addict, Neil upgraded us to the newest version of Smack in a hurry and turned off the delayed message parser which, for now, seems to have solved the problem.

You also may have stumbled upon a number of unannounced new commands in PartyChat recently -- I hope to post an update explaining how to use these features in detail soon.

Announcements ahoy

2007-01-11T17:30:00.000-05:00

Partychat's convenient alias command lets you chat with an alias instead of your jabber id, but unfortunately does not obey the principle of least surprise. As a result our friend group has too many conversations of the following form:

["dolapo"] i think dan is the greatest.
["realdolapo"] dammit dan, change your alias.

Tired of being the brunt of these sorts of "jokes" I decided to modify partychat to publicly announce changes to chat room state. Now when Dan decides to change his alias, partychat will say xxxxx@gmail.com (dan) is now known as dolapo. This should reduce the amount of frustration in my life while hopefully forcing Dan to step it up in the humor department.

One year of PartyChat

2006-12-04T21:39:00.000-05:00

Today marks one year since PartyChat launched. During that time, I've definitely fallen prey to the "eh, it works well enough" mentality, but thankfully a couple of my friends have not. Just in time for PartyChat's one year anniversary, Dolapo and Kushal have added some new features. Dolapo added ++points, a way of assigning points to whatever you feel like... it's a popular little feature we've had in internal chat rooms at Google for a while now. Kushal fixed a number of bugs in Dolapo's code as well adding /me actions, a popular IRC feature.

To give ++points, just type word++ and the scorer will assign a point to the word. Type word-- and it'll subtract a point. We generally use ++points to reward good behavior and penalize Kushal for bad puns. To check scores just type /score or /score word to get the score of just the word. You'll also notice that for some reason we also keep track of the ++points on the last letter of each word -- that's an homage to one of the, uh, the minor bugs in the original implementation of the point tracker.

To use /me actions, begin a message with /me (for example, /me is hungry) and all the members of the PartyChat will get the message in italics with your email/alias substituted in for /me (back to the example, if your alias was "punshal," PartyChat would say punshal is hungry).

Now that I've got Dolapo and Kushal on board, hopefully there'll be even more features coming! One can only hope. So here's to another year of PartyChat -- keep chattin'.

beta blogger

2006-08-14T13:59:00.000-04:00

Well, this wasn't much of a side project as it was my (and the rest of the blogger team's) main project for the last year, but beta.blogger.com is now launched with this as the second inaugural post on the new system.

tinyg.us

2006-03-24T01:38:00.000-05:00

I'd like to introduce you to another little side project of mine, tinyg.us ("Tiny Gus").

tinyg.us is a quick way of linking to places on the internet, using the power of Google's I'm Feeling Lucky feature. If someone is asking you about "All your base are belong to us," you would probably fire up Google, search for ["All your base"], click on the first result, copy the resulting url, and then paste it into your message. That's too much work. Now, you can just type tinyg.us/all.your.base into your im/e-mail and fire it away. When your friend clicks the link, they'll automatically be directed to the first Google result for ["All your base"]. It's as easy as pie.

For more information, check out info.tinyg.us. If you don't understand how tinyg.us works, or have comments on how it could work better, let me know (techwalla(a)gmail.com). Enjoy!

Disclaimer: I happen to work for Google. tinyg.us was produced without any internal knowledge about Google and is not endorsed by Google in any way. If you have any problems with it, please contact only me.

New website

2006-03-12T16:04:00.000-05:00

I now have a static page which explains the basics of PartyChat with an FAQ. Check it out. In the mean time, I'll continue to make announcements and give tips in this blog.

PartyChat Tip #2

2006-03-12T14:04:00.000-05:00

PartyChat works with Gmail Chat. Also, all your conversations are logged to your Gmail account, including messages you missed when you were not logged in.

apartment internet flakiness

2006-01-30T20:59:00.000-05:00

Sorry for PartyChat's repeated downtime. My apartment's TimeWarner connection has taken to being uber-flakey which causes issues in the Smack library I use for PartyChat. Hopefully TW will get its act together soon.

PartyChat Tip #1

2005-12-12T23:21:00.000-05:00

If you're in a party chat that you don't plan to leave, alias the party chat name in your
buddy list. This way you don't need to remember that "partychat#@gmail.com" is where you're in party chat "drivel" -- you can see and receive messages from "drivel" itself.

double the excitement

2005-12-12T23:12:00.000-05:00

I've managed to corral my friend Rohit in to help me develop PartyChat, so hopefully stability / feature set should improve more rapidly in days to come. Also, a lot of the features he wants to add are best accomplished through rewriting most of the current code (making it better) which bodes well for (a) me doing documentation and (b) the code being eventually released.

server update

2005-12-05T23:59:00.000-05:00

I was originally running PartyChat on my desktop with a wireless connection; sadly the wireless connection in my apt is incredibly flakey so the server would get disconnected every few hours. I've now moved PartyChat to a dedicated machine physically connected to our internet router, so it should be much more stable now. Enjoy!

PartyChat launched!

2005-12-04T17:17:00.000-05:00

Techwalla is pleased to announce the launch of PartyChat for Google Talk. PartyChat is like a group chat, except that it's less obtrusive and persistent across different login sessions.

For example, say your friends are in a party chat named "drivel". To enter the chat, IM partychat@gmail.com with the line "/enter drivel." After that, you'll receive messages sent in "drivel" from partychat@gmail.com and all messages you send to partychat@gmail.com will be broadcasted to your friends in "drivel."

If you log out of Google Talk and then log back in, you're still in the party chats you were in prior to logging out. To leave a party chat, IM "/leave" or "/exit" to the address you were chatting with (e.g. partychat@gmail.com).

But maybe you want to be in multiple partychats? Instead of partychat@gmail.com, you can also connect using partychat0@gmail.com, partychat1@gmail.com, partychat2@gmail.com, and so on, up to partychat9@gmail.com.

It doesn't matter which PartyChat address your friends are connected to. If your friend Jimmy creates a party chat named jimmy-drivel while talking to partychat2@gmail.com, you can join by IM'ing "/enter jimmy-drivel" to your own favorite address (like, maybe partychat4@gmail.com).

So send an im to partychat@gmail.com (or partychat0@gmail.com, partychat1@gmail.com, etc.), make a chat, join a chat, and have fun!

(Big thanks to Michael Bolin for all his continued help with developing/deploying PartyChat)

Disclaimer: I happen to work for Google. PartyChat was produced without any internal knowledge of Google Talk and is not endorsed by Google in any way. If you have any problems with it, please contact only me.