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.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Announcements ahoy
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.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.
["realdolapo"] dammit dan, change your alias.
Monday, December 04, 2006
One year of PartyChat
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'.
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'.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)